The cold weather is coming in to towns around the country and it is time to take action to prepare your pipes for the big freeze. If you dwell in a relatively temperate part of the country, sub freezing temperatures might easily catch you by surprise. That's when they can do the most damage. Dallas, for example, saw alot of freezing weather last year as arctic air, paradoxically generated by Global warming, blew in from the panhandle. Freezing temperatures are already appearing in 2011, and weather watchers are predicting that the recent bitterly cold winters may continue indefinitely.
Defending your {domicile's|home's plumbing is especially important for people who will be out of town throughout the cold season, or those who have unoccupied floors in the upper part of the home. In order to cut back on the fuel costs, most people lower the thermostat in unused rooms. This leaves plumbing pipes in those sections of the house particularly vulnerable to crystalizing. Just imagine returning from a holiday and discovering your valuable floor coverings destroyed by a large flood brought on by a burst plumbing pipe and you can understand the urgency of winterizing the plumbing fixtures in your home.
The good news is, most all purpose plumbing companies offer a a pre-winter pipe protection plan, which can be personally designed to meet your home plumbing needs. While every abode and each situation is unique, here's what you can expect a plumbing company can do for you.
Plumbing companies will start by placing insulation all over exposed plumbing pipes, principally pipes around outside walls, which are the pipes most likely to bring cold into the house. homeowners who will be out of town for a long period of time most often leave their thermostat set at 40 degrees.
Now comes the real task. When protecting the plumbing of a domicile for householders who will be out of town for most of the winter, the plumbing company will drain all the pipes in the domicile. To do this safely, they need to turn off the electricity to the water heater and boiler, and shut off the gas flow to gas powered heaters. Next they will add anti-freeze to the pipes, to keep them from bursting, even in the most frigid weather. Anti-freeze will be added to the commodes as well.
When winterizing the plumbing of dwellings with unused upper floors, a plumber might install, as needed, shut off valves for the plumbing pipes leading to the upper rooms. For for convenience sake, the plumber will switch the valves from gate valves to ball valves, which require an easy 1/4 turn to shut off the water supply. All kinds of exposed pipes have to be covered as plastic pipes are as vulnerable to freezing as pipes made of metal. According to Byron Graham, a Baltimore plumber with A-1 Plumbing of Baltimore, galvanized pipes that break are the hardest to fix, so he does not recommend using galvanized pipes in areas in danger of pipe freezing.
The price of plumbing winter protection varies from area to area and domicile to domicile, but it is money well worth investing. our most recent winters have been some of the coldest in recent times, and the media and Internet presented reports of record numbers of frozen pipe.
Preparing your plumbing pipes for winter brings with it the peace of mind of being certain that your plumbing pipes will safely last through the winter.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.thearticleson.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites