Canada experiences robust temperatures below the freezing point of water, yet plenty of people happily live there and presumably shower each morning. Today, despite living in a temperate south pacific paradise, I did not. Hot water pipes frozen.
This is bothersome.
So Canadians who live in surburban homes or in the countryside, how is your plumbing configured to prevent freezing?
Probably for the same reason that their roads stay open, when ours come to a stop with an inch of snow. They expect the cold weather and insulate.
Mmm…maybe Bob although we expect low temps in this rural area and I trusted our plumbers to get it right. For example, there is a heater in the water-pump box and a hot cable wrapped around the water inlet pipe both of which switch on if the air temperature reaches 1 C.
I’m not a Canadian but I live in Alaska.
Heat Trace and insulation wins.
Insulation keeps the cold out and heat trace keeps the warm in.
IANOP, I am not a plumber but insulation and heat trace rocks.
Others have already mentioned insulation and heating. Another big step is circulation. When you know the temperature is going to be low, you leave the water running on a trickle in a bathtub or sink. That way the water keeps moving and can’t freeze in place.
All of the above, plus don’t forget basements.
Outside the building, all pipes are buried below the frost level.
All water pipes enter the building through the basement, entering from below the frost level.
Inside, all water pipes are enclosed within the structure of the building. So, since buildings are all heated during the winter, the pipes are kept above freezing for the duration.
If there is an extended power outage, then the building will eventually cool down to outside air temperature. If this is below freezing, the pipes will freeze.
And in the event of an extended power outage, if you don’t have a generator, turn off the water main, run the faucets and flush the toilet, and dump some antifreeze into the toilet and sinks. Burst water pipes in a basement or crawlspace can be near-catastrophic in terms of damage and cost.
Not Canada, but Michigan. This is what I did when we had the giant ice storm in late December last year and my power was out for six days. Wow, there’s a wiki entry for the ice storm. It was a bad one.
Aha - heat trace, yes that’s the key. I have one trace wire for the pipe from the water tank and it works.
Yes that is sensible but I’m on tank water which relies on rainfall so running water risks emptying the tank. Plus running hot water even in a trickle is expensive.
We do not heat buildings/houses, in the North American sense. If nobody is at home or even overnight, heating is at a minimum. I had the woodburner hot last night and the electric underfloor heating on overnight and nevertheless the pipes froze.
I grew up in Winnipeg, where winter usually lasts from November through April. In my suburban childhood home, the pipes were buried underground, below the usual frost line. In addition, basements are usually finished and somewhat heated in Winnipeg; this means that there’s less likelihood of a pipe freezing inside your house.
That said, this system isn’t foolproof. This past winter was as harsh in Winnipeg as it was anywhere else (perhaps harsher), and the frost line ended up rather deeper than usual. In some areas, many houses had frozen pipes, and houses that were at risk were given special permission to run their water continuously — for free — until the worst of the freeze was over.
I’ve never given it a thought. Between thorough insulation and central heating, it’s not an issue. In the two houses I’ve owned, it’s never happened.
Just thought of something - our pipes are not enclosed in exterior walls. They’re in interior walls, or in the case of the kitchen, come up from the basement directly to the sink, free-standing. Either way, the pipes are at the same temperature as the rest of the house.
It bemused when when I’ve been in Ireland or the UK and have seen pipes on the outside walls, exposed to the elements.
Where do you live?
I’m surprised your house cooled enough to freeze pipes in what would, I guess, be equivalent to Dec. 1 for the Northern hemisphere. Our coldest part of winter is usually two months later. I’d expect the coldest Dec. 1 ever gets here to be routine temperatures at the end of January. We’d have to be able to handle that.
Some things to add to the above. As Piper said, no plumbing in exterior walls (except venting - can get away with that). If we need plumbing at an exterior wall or ceiling we build a false ‘plumbing wall’ in front of the insulated and vapour barrier wall. Supply for exterior hose bibs have a drainable shut-off valve on the heated interior, there are modern ‘frost free’ versions that drain themselves after use.
You will sometimes see plumbing on basement frost walls (insulated wood framed wall built in front of foundation wall), but proper practice is to have all the plumbing on the warm side of the vapour barrier and exposed to air circulation.
Modern PEX supply lines are more resistant to bursting than copper, it is supposed to be burst-proof but it still bursts occasionally.
Your gravity system will need to be drained if you don’t want frozen pipes. Keep your reservoir full but drain the lines or set up a circulating system that returns your water back to the reservoir.
All the community’s here in Northern MN were ordered to run our water with a pencil size stream for over a month this late winter. Three weeks ago a near by community was repairing broken water mains and the ductile steel water mains were full of ice when they were dug up. The Apartment serviced by that main had a 1-1/2 inch fire hose running across the ground from a block away.
Defiantly a memorable winter!
Do I have a false memory, or am I correct that when I was a kid (in New England), we used to turn our hose bibs off from the inside during the winter? There were shut-off valves inside in the basement.
it is best to have a shut off valve in the basement. you want to drain the pipe after the shut off valve, more modern valves have a drainback feature.
Pretty sure we had those in Ottawa when I was an ankle-biter.
If a hose bib is an outside tap, yes, we do that on the fall. Turn off the water inside, then open the hose tap outside. Water drains out, and any left in the pipe will have room to expand if it freezes, so the pipe won’t crack.
It was the worst Winnipeg and environs winter in two million years — or 150 years, I can’t remember which, but colder than Mars, as Mike S’s first link, above, says — and a first for the number of frozen water pipes, although Brandon, 120 miles west, always has had the problem.
This May 31 story says that about 400 pipes are still frozen, despite temperatures hitting the low 80s F in the past 10 days or so.
A video at the link includes a graphic showing how deep the frost extended.
Sorry, MikeS. I didn’t realize I linked to the same story you did.