Reminder: Avoid frozen and burst water pipes and huge plumbing bills.

[Chainfire]

9. I will give you an long-winded anecdote about freezing pipes.

Here in North Florida, in the late 70s we had a really cold winter. We had several days with temps in the ten degree range. At the time I was a plumber who was working with his tools. Of course, damn near everything in Tallahassee froze, bursting pipes like crazy.

I went to one house, in the suburbs, that had enough broken pipes for it to take me seven hours to fix. I got everything back online, and before leaving, I had a chat with the owner. It went something like this, "It is going to be as cold tonight as it was last night. You can avoid it freezing up again if you will leave the water in the two tubs at opposite ends of the house dripping." I then and showed him where and how much.

The next morning, I was dispatched to the same man's house again. Everything that I had fixed had frozen and split again. I spent another seven or so hours doing all of the repairs. When I finished, I had the same speech with him about leaving the faucets dripping, to which he replied, "Well, running that water cost a lot of money." I told him with a smug smile, "I will see you tomorrow."

If he thought that water was expensive, I would have loved to see his face when he was billed for 14 hours of a plumber and helper.

The idea, in areas that have pipes that are exposed to the weather, is to keep enough 60 degree water from under the streets flowing through the system to keep the piping system above 32 degrees. You folks in the North don't have to worry about it because your building codes and plumbers put it in with sub-freezing temps in mind. I suspect your worst plumbing danger is if you lose heat in the house, and it got below freezing inside, then you would need to resort to the Southern dripping strategy.