Wait, It Gets Worse

So when I last wrote I was a day past the second coldest day of my lifetime. I was home for the weekend. I had the boiler running.  The house was warming up, the family was happy and everything was looking great. 

I was naive.

On Saturday I did my morning inspection and realized the house temperature wasn't really where I expected it to be.  We keep the kids-side of the house thermostat set to 59 degrees (they will work through our parenting in therapy when they get older) but this morning it was 55.  Sure, even with the really great furnace we have it takes hours to raise the house temperature by a few degrees but once there it does a really great job of holding it.  When I saw it was low I had an ominous feeling.

A radiator with a hairline crack running
almost the full length of one fin.  Research
tells me this can be filled with JB Weld.
It seems like a good summer project.

That feeling intensified when I got to the basement. The boiler panel read PR_0.  I have seen that once before. It means Pressure Zero.  Somewhere in the system there was a leak.  To find it I turned on the fill valve and walked around.  It didn't take long.  In a small room off the basement garage where it is our understanding the driver used to live, back in a time where our house employed servants, there was water gushing from a radiator.  It was a foot long split in the cast iron.

At this same time pressure on me was intensifying to get the water working in the kitchen sink.  This is also the families source of filtered drinking water and talk was happening about maybe the need to buy bottled water.  Something I consider fine out of necessity for an event but six people in a house can go through an environmentally unconscionable amount of bottled water in day to day living.

I had been running an electric heater in the sink basin for a few days, but it had just been so cold it couldn’t seem to un-thaw it.  I began to suspect the freeze-up was not actually in the basin but in the garage below the kitchen.  When I did further inspection I found that not only to be the case, but in a way it was lucky because the pipes, old fashion CPVC plastic had split and broken.  Both the hot and the cold.  If it had thawed out in the basement I would have had a real mess. Now added to my task list was re-plumbing the kitchen.  As much as the family wanted a working sink again, it wasn’t going to be a quick fix and getting the heat back on took precedence.

The Pex tubing where the radiator used to sit.

What I did to get around the radiator problem was to just bypass it.  I installed a 3/4” Pex line from the radiator input to its return.  Tightened the whole thing up and moved on.  The basement room would no longer have heat, which is going to cause us more trouble in the bathroom off our bedroom.  The plumbing there will be even more prone to freezing that it already is.  But at the time I didn’t know any way around it.  Since that time I have done more research and discovered a product called JB Weld.  A two part epoxy putty with enough flexibility to stay water tight through the expansion and contraction of the radiator.  I might write more about it later when I actually apply it.

There were two dead cars in my driveway.  I had to replace one battery and brought the other in to thaw out.  It was a long day but by the end of it I refilled the heating system with water.  Got the pressure back up.  Everything was holding water.  The house was beginning to warm up.  I had one bedroom prone to air bubbles in the system that wasn’t heating yet but I was feeling pretty good.  This whole freeze up was behind me.

I was naive.

The cold water pipe to the kitchen sink.
Lucky for me this pipe was still frozen.

Sunday morning I knew everything was fine.  I lounged.  I drank coffee.  I relaxed.  Basking in my confidence of surmounting every difficulty.  About ten we were planning lunch for the family and I went to the basement to grab something from the deep freeze.  What was that sound?  Gushing water?  Is someone running the wash machine?  I opened the laundry room door and discovered my state had added a new lake over the course of the evening.  Lake Laundry. The boiler was back to showing PR_0 and I had new problems.

When things freeze up, they take a very long time to unthaw.  What I didn’t realize is when the pipes froze they had large plugs of ice inside them.  With the basement just barely above freezing it took a long time for those ice plugs to thaw out.  When they did, the heating water could get to places it hadn’t been able to the day before.  Those places all had pipes that had broken in the freeze.  In my case, the cold water return pipe for the radiator in the garage had three broken spots in it.  In the process of discovering that I found the cold water pipe going to the laundry sink was cracked as well as both traps in the drain.  My wife had been bothering me to replace the sink for years, it looked to me like just as good a time as any.

I love how the Pex tubing can be color coded.

By Monday night with the handy plumbing assistance of my youngest daughter we had everything running again.  We used Pex tubing for all the new plumbing.  I drained out the radiator in the garage and determined it had not frozen.  For now that radiator is bypassed as well.   I will plan to hook it up in the summer as another heating zone.  A new laundry sink has been purchased.  We bought a two sided sink and I have cut out the center divider so we can use it as a dog washing station.  And, we have framed in a stud wall in the laundry room so we can insulate it this summer after I remove the window and replace it with some glass block.

So this freeze up was huge.  Record setting cold temperatures made for a record number of problems.  But I guess we got through it.

I love Pex tubing.  It is super quick to work with.  Really
easy to add things later.  And can handle freezing!

The sink with the center divider cut out.