Posts Tagged ‘ice’

Frozen Ballcocks!

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

What a morning and afternoon, Lindsey woke me up this morning at silly o’clock, complaining she couldn’t have a shower because there was no cold water!

If you look back in the archives, here, if you examine the photographs carefully and look towards the rear of the photographs, you can see some “loft insulation” that’s been used as lagging around the copper hot and cold water pipes, and also the hot and cold water header tanks.

It would appear that the temperature dropped overnight to something ridiculous which froze the ball cock in the cold water header tank, and also froze one of the pipes.

So, after taking off the cold water feed to the shower unit, and there was no water, putting a 3kWatt fan heater in the attic/loft to warm the loft up, which thawed out the frozen ball cock, eventually combination of fan heater and sun shine on the roof thawed out the pipework.

The only difficulty was connecting the pipe back up, with water coming out of it under pressure from the header tank, and no way to stop it, so I had to let the tank drain, before re-connecting, so I got a bit wet!

So it looks like loft insulation isn’t up to the job of insulating pipes!

That’s another DIY job sometime!

Merry #@!? Chrimbo!

Post to Twitter