My Faucet Runneth Over

Handyman Bob saved the day yesteday, when he stopped by after work to assess the frozen faucet situation. He brought with him a device that looked and acted like a turbo-powered hairy dryer. First we tried heating up the pipes using this device with little progress.

Then we went into the basement to inspect the pipes further. There is a portion of my pipes that is exposed almost directly to the cold ground. I can see them through a hole in my basement wall that looks like a window. The window revealed a few pipes tunneling underground away from my house. They would not be easy to access.

Bob and I pondered how to deal with this.

Bob had an idea.

We went back into the kitchen and started dumping hot water from the bathroom sink through a hole in the floor of the kitchen beneath the sink that followed the cold pipe down into the business. We dumped several bowls of water down the hole and saw no evidence of improvement. So I called my land lady. She seemed genuinely surprised that this happened.

Was I gone over the weekend? No.

Had I turned the heat way down? No.

Just as she was advising me to take my space heater into the basement and point it so it blasted heat through the hole/"window" in the wall onto the pipes, water began to drip from my faucet. After dumping a couple more bowls of water onto the pipes, soon the cold water was flowing. Not long after that, so was the hotwater.

Bob advised me to keep my water running at a slow dribble until the cold weather has subsided, and we return to the balmy, above-zero temperatures we so adore.