frozen pipes

[juldea]

Diagnosis: the heat from the furnace to my house having been turned off, the pipes were allowed to sit in the cold and hence froze over (I don't understand the process involved that would have the gas-heat pipes freeze, since it was just those and not the hot water which is working fine, but I accept that it sounds reasonable.) Efforts are being made to unfreeze these pipes, and in the meantime I'm stuck huddled around space heaters.

Oh, for extra fun: I had one space heater of my own, but I borrowed another from hakamadare and chaiya. Of course it made sense to me to plug it into the same outlet as my computer, and flipped a breaker. ;) That has since been fixed and extension cords are being utilized to spread the power usage out over different circuits in the apartment.

Heh. Whee.

Comments

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

It is possible that the heating pipes are in more exposed places than the water pipes.

Space heaters draw a lot of juice, usually well over 50% of the rating of any circuit. They should always be on separate circuits. Some time spent reverse labeling the fusebox (that is labeling each outlet with the circuit number of the breaker it is on) would ease this problem in the future.

Best of luck getting this fixed soon. Stay warm.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Yes, but what is there inside heating pipes to freeze? I know that it is gas heat, and if it got cold enough to freeze gasses... I am completely ignorant of how the heat works, I have realized, and I should probably fix this. Ignorance = bad.

I do know that space heaters eat large amounts of electricity. I had simply temporarily turned off my brain when I plugged it into my power strip. I suppose I'm very lucky that nothing was actually damaged.

While I do not have labels on the fusebox and outlets, I do have knowledge of what outlets in the house are on separate circuits. This is how I was able to put that second space heater on an outlet that wouldn't overload anything after the, "Doh!" moment.

For the record, I am VERY prone to, "Quit talking to me like I'm stupid!!" frustration, but I am avoiding it in this case because we don't really talk all that much for you to know so. ;) That said, your whole second paragraph from someone else would have definitely aroused that frustration from me.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Not to -- y'know -- sound like I'm talking to you like you're stupid, but are you sure it's the gas lines that froze, and not the heating-water lines? I can't see how gas lines would freeze.

My suspicion would be that you have forced-water heat, which is to say there is a separate, closed-loop water system where water is heated in the basement by a boiler that runs to each radiator, and that it is those water lines that have frozen. In such a case the it'll take some time to unfreeze, since most of those lines are buried in walls and whatnot and the pump can't push hot water to the frozen bits to unfreeze them. On the plus side it should be warm today and warmer tomorrow, so that should loosen it up; if this happened next weekend, you'd be stuck to doing silly things like blowing hair dryers into holes in the wall. It's also worth it to look for leaks (well, $landlord should look for leaks), because the ice might have expanded enough to break something.

And for the record, when our heat went out last week I *also* blew the fuse plugging in a space heater. Well, technically, it was turning on a light so I could move the space heater to another circuit but....same idea.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

You're not talking to me like I'm stupid, because I already said I'm ignorant here. ;) That said, I did suspect that perhaps the heating system worked by using gas to heat up water that would then run to the radiators. And yep, we're aware that burst pipes might happen. I hope not, though, as that would suck mightily.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

It is a gas-powered furnace with forced water heat, yes. We have another space heater aimed at the pipes in the crawl space, and that seems to have helped a lot, at the very least.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Yay! :)

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

While I do not have labels on the fusebox

this is arguably something we (as landlords) should do; give me a shout if there’s a particular time when i can spend a few minutes going around your apartment and flipping breakers to see which lights turn off.

also, the various explanations about forced-water heat are correct.

-steve

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Well, I did do a bit of the breaker-flipping last night to get a generalized sense of things. You were right; the living room and bedroom are all on the same circuit! Craziness. But sure, if you wanna come by and do a full testing, I'm sure we can work it out.