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

[crimson5.livejournal.com]

Reason #259 that I will never move any farther north than I currently am. And will move as far south as I can, just as soon as I find an area I like. Florida, Texas, California, and Alabama are all out for various reasons, any other suggestions?

[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.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Sorry, about inducing frustration, especially in your situation. The problem is deciding what is insulting obvious, and what is useful new information. For instance, gas heating pipes (from the furnace to your radiators) are filled with hot water (or possibly, though I expect not, steam). It was these that froze. There is also a gas pipe from the street to your furnace which carries gas. I would have hesitated to include this information on the basis that it might be too insultingly simple. On the other hand, reverse labeling of outlets is an idea which I have never seen anyone else do, and which took me twenty years of messing with fuse boxes to figure out. And few people seem to have any idea how much current their appliances draw. So I thought I was truly adding new information. Sigh.

I answer questions like this frequently on the 'net, in a forum with complete newbies, and experienced professionals, and getting the right mix of information is always tough. Again, sorry that I missed in your case.

Thank You Kindly,

Corwyn

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

Before you moved in, we hired an electrician to upgrade the service to the apartment and fix the circuit breaker labelling. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the electrician hasn't been available to come back and finish the job for a few months, and now the ground is frozen, so he can't dig holes for the grounding rods or something. So that's on hold for the moment.

In terms of the heating pipes versus water pipes, this is what I think happened: londo turned off the heat for the apartment during a blizzard. Which was silly of him, but I trust you to dole out appropriate punishment. The apartment stopped calling for heat, which meant that the furnace stopped having to heat those associated pipes. Which meant that they froze, almost up to the point where they meet the furnace in the basement, and we're still trying to figure out if they've burst a seam somewhere in the crawl space. The hot water pipes, however, are constantly being heated, so they didn't freeze. This is possibly an energy inefficiency for the house, but the crawl space under the house is damn cold, so it kept those pipes from freezing.

The pipes going into the crawl space are now piping hot (pun!) after our night of heat application to the pipes, so I'm hopeful that there's heat in your apartment now. No one is answering the phone at your place, however, so I can't be certain. I didn't want to just go in there and check without talking to you first, in case someone's home sleeping or something.

Spoke too soon!

[etherial.livejournal.com]

The moment you told me the temperature in the apartment when you got home, I thought "Phew! At least her pipes haven't frozen!"

PS - londo is dumb.