Well, I’m, not a plumber (just a generally handy guy). I wouldn’t think you would need to install anything special. Is there a convent place to dump the water you are draining?
I’m north/west Texas. My usual is to, close crawl space vents where present, leave the facets dripping at far ends of the house, insulate the hose bibs and hope they don’t burst. Big freeze like last year or a few before and I drop a box fan over the crawl space access and pop the attic access holes. Everything is great till loss of gas or electric but then you’re kinda boned anyways.
I don’t know what is best, but I am in Fort Worth and during the freeze I left all the taps in the house open just enough for a steady drip, both hot and cold, and had no issues. I don’t normally do that for a freeze but with the temps dropping so low and long, I wasn’t going to trust a house insulated in 1972 to keep enough heat on pipes in exposed walls or the attic.
I was fortunate not too lose power but even then the attic and garage both dropped below freezing for more than 24 hours.
I had a cut off valve installed on the mainline the last time I had a leak so I could kill water to the whole house. If I had lost power in the cold, I would have shut off everything there and drained the lines best I could.
Dripping faucets or heat tape aren’t common in the north either, only in extreme weather or problematic pipe locations usually in older houses. Heat tape is expensive to operate. Regardless, it sounds like running the pipes through the attic is because most houses are slab-on-grade. If you have a crawl space or basement, that’s the place to run pipes. Older houses and commercial properties would run pipes in slabs, but that makes repair work a huge problem. With little to no frost depth, building houses with crawl spaces or basements would be more expensive, and fewer people would buy those houses, complaining about the price. Pick your poison.
Reminding people about pipes in freezing weather in normally mild climates is to tell people to do things that northerners know about and do every season. The big one is shutting off and draining the hose bibbs. Yes there are frost-free ones, but they extend a good 12" or so into the house so you’re still more likely to find a simple shutoff valve and drain. Anyone who’s always lived in a mild climate where you don’t have to do that every fall wouldn’t think about it normally. Same for bringing in delicate plants or pets. Are doghouse manufacturers “getting away with shit” by not heating and insulating them?
This and CPVC pipe blows my mind. Did we not learn anything from the PolyB fiasco? Sure a crawlspace adds expense, but that’s what local building codes are for, to create a baseline so everyone has to do it.
I guess it’s Texas and it just follows from the anti regulation attitude there.