Speedy's Cafe - General Chat about anything you like!

[Fantasy Lover]

Where do you live and what is your climate like?

I would only really worry about frozen pipes in winter.

Certainly at the moment we only have our heating on when we are in the house and we never have it on overnight.

Ours is quite a small, modern house though.

I live in Belgium and the climate is like England

[besleybean]

Yeah, so I wouldn't be concerned...although we are not too far off frosts.

[Fantasy Lover]

I probably should turn on the heat a little when it's nearly 0°c

[besleybean]

Yes, do you have a frost free setting?

I think we have that on ours.

[Fantasy Lover]

I don't know

[J.P.]

The pipes can freeze only by frost, so now it's not the problem.

I use those to control the heating:

http://www.conrad.com/ce/en/overview/0812040/Programmable-Thermostatic-Radiator-Valves

[besleybean]

I take it you live alone?

You may want to familiarise yourself with your boiler!

Or at least the various settings.

You may also be able to time it to come on and off at different times.

 

[Fantasy Lover]

Yes, I live alone

[Pseudonym]

You shouldn't need to worry about freezing pipes until the depths of winter, if you don't have pools of frozen water outside you definitely don't need to worry about your pipes. When it does get really cold I usually set the timer so it kicks in briefly every couple of hours, and keep the thermostat low so it doesn't cost a fortune when it does kick in. You probably have some sort of timer on your boiler, most do these days, but if not you can probably buy one that you can integrate. If your weather is like the UK, we don't really have weather harsh enough to have to worry about the pipes for long anyway, when I set the boiler to cutting in and out it's usually only if it's heavily snowing, in which case I'm likely to be home and have it on anyway. 

[Caya]

Does anyone has some knowledge about heating? I turn off the heat when I go to work, but my mom says that's bad because the pipes can freeze. But I don't want a ridiculous heating bill so Idk what to do

 

Outside pipes can certainly freeze and burst, but if you have a garden you're probably familiar with the yearly song-and-dance of making the outside water source winter ready. But unless your house is not bordering on anything and gets a lot of wind chill, I'd not worry about the inside pipes if you're just gone for a couple hours. If you can't see your breath in the hallway when you come home, you should be fine. ;) You might want to invest in a suitable thermostat though - we have one that is not only programmable to certain temperatures at certain times, but can also be set to not let the temperature drop below 8 degrees Celsius (46 to our friends across the ocean) when we are gone for more than a day, like visiting the in-laws. This has proven to be high enough (even in a particularly frosty year, when temperatures went down to -20/-4 while we were away) to keep the walls in our townhouse warm enough for the pipes to survive just fine. You might want to adjust that temperature depending on your living situation, but there's no need to keep heating at full blast when you're not there to enjoy it.

[Pseudonym]

I'm interested - you have to do things to your outside pipes? Our outside pipes here are all buried. 

[Caya]

Well there's the faucet where I plug the garden hose on to, that one's certainly outside. There's a valve inside the cellar which I close every autumn, then open the faucet outside and let the water still inside that part of the pipe drain (forgot to do that the first year we had our own garden, which resulted in a plumber bill ). Reverse the process in spring, and so on. The main pipes are buried deep enough that we don't have to worry, though, yep.

[besleybean]

I know, our outside tap suffers.

[Carol the Dabbler]

I agree with the prior posters -- don't turn your heat OFF, just turn the thermostat down to 40-ish.

 

If you're expecting an unusually cold spell, there's one more thing you can do. If your kitchen and/or bathroom plumbing runs through a built-in cabinet that's against an exterior wall, then leave that cabinet's doors open (so the warmer air in the room can waft in and keep the pipes from freezing). Oh, and if it's going to get even colder than *that*, then leave the water running just a trickle. But I suspect CAMPer and I have far more need to remember those two tips than you do.

 

How cold has it *ever* gotten where you live (i.e., the record low)?

[Pseudonym]

Well there's the faucet where I plug the garden hose on to, that one's certainly outside. There's a valve inside the cellar which I close every autumn, then open the faucet outside and let the water still inside that part of the pipe drain (forgot to do that the first year we had our own garden, which resulted in a plumber bill ). Reverse the process in spring, and so on. The main pipes are buried deep enough that we don't have to worry, though, yep.

 

Ah, that makes sense, I thought you had some weird crazy plumbing where you had to go out and insulate all the pipes in the garden or something ;)

[Carol the Dabbler]

... I thought you had some weird crazy plumbing where you had to go out and insulate all the pipes in the garden or something ;)

There are parts of southwestern England where they'll need to do precisely that if they ever have a major record-breaking cold spell, because their main drain pipes run down the back of the house on the outside. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in Weymouth a few years back, and whenever I sat on the rear terrace, I would hear a mighty rush of water every time someone upstairs flushed a toilet.

[Pseudonym]

My toilet drain pipe is on the outside of the house, but since it's only in use when the toilet is flushed it's not susceptible to freezing. Was it like that?

[Carol the Dabbler]

Maybe it was just the toilet drain. But even that would be pretty iffy here. I can imagine ice building up inside it layer by layer, like an inside-out icicle.

[Pseudonym]

Doesn't really get cold enough for those kind of shenanigans here. :D

[besleybean]

I think with climate change, we'll soon all have fewer such concerns.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

I know we turn down the heat overnight and when we're going to be gone an extended period of time. Come winter, I (& Johnspec) get to deal with -20F as a real possibility for the high temperature (doesn't happen every year that we get that cold for the high temperature. It's more likely to be the low for the day). And -40 is not unheard of on occasion.

 

If the heating ever goes out when the ground is frozen & temperatures are below freezing definitely follow Carol's advice of running water at a trickle for your faucets.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Happy Halloween, everybody!

[Pseudonym]

Happy Halloween to you too! Wish I was doing something more exciting then sitting in work, but ah well. 

 

Have a spooky gif :D

 

[Arcadia]

Eeeek!

[Carol the Dabbler]

While it's still the 31st here, I'm gonna tell y'all about the time I had my Girl Scout troop over for a Halloween party. At one point, we were sitting in a circle with the lights out, telling ghost stories -- when all of a sudden we saw a ghost bobbing around just outside the window. We all screamed and hid behind our chairs.

 

Turned out my father had decided to participate by making a ghost out of an old bedsheet, then climbing onto the roof and dangling it over the edge on a rope.

 

I had a really cool Daddy!