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Baby, It’s Cold Outside
So we have to let water drip all night
The temperature hit 12 degrees here last night. We live in a manufactured home sitting on a crawl space, which means freezing water pipes are something that can happen.
We have heat tape, but we don’t have any way to know that it is working other than crawling under the house. That’s not something I want to do anytime at all, never mind now.
How cold does it get underneath?
Last year I put a remote wireless thermometer in the crawl space. That device let me measure the temperature under the house from the comfort of inside. I found that the heat from the house does raise the temperature of the crawl space by at least ten degrees. As we seldom get outside temperatures below twenty-two degrees, I felt we would be safe with or without heat tape.
However, 12 degrees could be a problem if it persisted for a few hours, so I dripped faucets at each end of the house last night.
The theory here is that you should run the faucet opposite where your water enters the house. That’s flat in the middle for us, so both ends.
Why run water? No, it’s not that running water can’t freeze. It can, though it will need a lower temperature. No, this is to relieve pressure from the ice…
