Winterize your home my Permies!

... Some time after the heat of mid July and a major (for your area) ice storm!

Sooo... I should have remembered. This pipe has burst before. Did you know to close off the shut off valve that you personally installed so it would not happen again? One more simple step is to drain the pipe. It is just the pipe to the outside spigot. Simple, yeah?

I was gonna go to bed early tonight. Too restless. I'd almost swear this house talks to me without words.

Catastrophe averted. I don't have to replace it till it warms a bit. I'm hopeful it's just a 8 foot section. PVC.

What do you do to winterize YOUR home?

Our land in GA has an easy winter ,  in most years, unlike my former house at 7000' elevation. But even so, I need to prepare for freezing.  

Being fastidious about our well is a primary concern. I close up the well house ventilation,  inspect the wiring and pressure gauge, and ensure the pressure switch is in good working order.
The second essential task is to prep our sun room on the southeast corner of this 1920 house.  It was built as a carport in 1967 when this place finally added an indoor bathroom, I used 18 windows and three doors in 2009 to enclose it completely. For about 7 months of the year this 24' by 22' room is open to nature and well ventilated,  so it behooves me to close it tightly and check weather stripping,  etc.  On a sunny day the temp is 30 to 40 degrees warmer with passive solar, so it's perfect for winter growing and propagation

Leave both the hot water and the cold water faucets dripping.

Heat your home a little warmer than usual before bedtime.

Leave cabinet doors open under sinks.

Use a heat tape where the pipe might freeze.

Sometimes the problem is the solution.  Need to plug up the crawlspace vents, and add insulation to the bottom of one outside wall where water pipes in the laundry room have once at least frozen.  What to do?  Crawl under there in the mud with styrofoam bits?  Then I thought, why not just pile up hay on the outside, and so I went out to do just that, and had to shovel the snow off the hay pile, and then it came to me....there's world class insulation laying a foot deep all over the landscape.  Ten minutes with the snow shovel...vents blocked, wall insulated three feet deep.  

I used to do that when I lived in a little travel trailer for 'mumble' years while building my house... the insulation behind the aluminum skin was so thin that a cave would melt out around the skin within a couple days.

My father used to collect leaf bags put out by people and pile them around the walls of his living space. Great insulation, and after a few years, what was in the bags had turned to rich garden soil.

My house does ok on “normally “ cold nights.  When we have an abnormally cold night forecast, I set the dishwasher to run about 3 or 4 a m.

I plan to put a timer on my clothes washer so I can set it to also run in the nighttime.  It’s the furthest from the water heater.  

If it’s a really really cold might, I run them in sequence. Otherwise one or the other.

Eventually, I would like to move the clothes washer to the water heater end of the house, and eliminate that whole run of pipe.

The idea of setting the timer on the dishwasher to prevent pipes from freezing  strikes me as brilliant.  

John F Dean wrote:The idea of setting the timer on the dishwasher to prevent pipes from freezing  strikes me as brilliant.  

Thanks John,

The hardest part is deciding when is the best time to run it!🤪🤣

Night temperature keeps dropping until sunrise… house temperature keeps falling… when is the do or die moment?!