Frozen pipes

It has been very cold here.  Our car thermometer said as low at minus 4 degrees as we drove to the temple Friday morning, starting about 5:30 am.  The daytime highs have been below 20 degrees.  When we got home from the temple at about at about 2:45 pm, we had no running water.  I talked this through with Matthew, then first checked with a couple of neighbors to find that they had running water in order to rule out that the city had shut down our water line.  Since none of the faucets were delivering water, it was apparent that there was blockage in the water line before it reached the distribution point which is in the wall in our laundry room.  The water line to our house comes in from 820 East to the east side of our house, and there is an inside shutoff valve low in the west wall of the downstairs family room.  Matthew reasoned that the most likely place for the intake line to freeze would be in the pipe beyond the shutoff valve that first rises to basement ceiling level then travels along the out side wall for a few feet until it turns inward at the middle of the house to go to the distribution point.  The line in from the street is buried under several feet of soil and would not be exposed to the cold temperature. 

We decide to get a plumber to our house to restore water and were able to find one who arrived by about 5 pm.  He said that he was confident that the freezing was in the main shutoff valve out by the street.  In their experience, this is by far the most common place for water line freezing, as there is only a metal plate to protect the line from cold temperatures.  We located valve cover under the snow.  He removed the cover, then stretched a power cord out to the place and plugged in a hair blow dryer and started the de-freezing process.  After about an hour of heating this valve, he looked further inside at the line that beyond the inside shutoff that Matthew had fingered as the problem area.  Wendy loaned him her hair dryer and he began to heat that line up from the inside shutoff valve.  Apparently both the line at the outside valve and the line along the cold wall beyond the inside valve were frozen.  Eventually the blockage in the outside line thawed and then added some pluggage to the inside freeze-up.  At about 7:30 pm we heard a roaring noise at the kitchen faucet that we had kept wide open and then the water appeared. 

We were quite relieved to have water again.  It was a good reminder of how precarious and essential this kind of resource is and of the need to store water, food, and other supplies, for emergencies of all sorts.

Our plumber thought that the freeze-up probably started at the outside valve and then with no movement in the line the inside freeze-up followed.  He suggested that we get some insulation (of the kind that goes in walls) and use it to fill up the cavity between the cover and the outside shutoff valve as a way to help prevent this from happening again.