Adventures in Home Ownership: Cold Weather Edition

It’s still cold. It’s been below freezing here for three or four days, without ever getting above. And today, we even got snow. A good inch of it, and it’s still on the ground, even. It’s started to melt off the roof, and it’s thinning on the grass, but it’s definitely there. Our work even closed for the day. That’s right! Snow day in Austin! Who would have thought? It does happen, though it’s quite rare, clearly. Though with more and more climate change, I suppose I should be keeping an eye out for this craziness more and more.

Regardless, it’s been cold. Slightly warmer now, but for a while we were talking in the low teens of temperature, and a few days ago when I came back from Judo (by the way: stepping outside into freezing weather with a sweaty undershirt still clinging to your back? That’s cold) Jess told me the hot water had stopped. A little bit of research said that three things needed to happen for the hot water heater to work: electricity, gas, and water. Well the electricity was working because the display was still on, the gas was working because the heater was still going, so that just left the water. Hmm...

I went out to the water heater and played around with the valves that opened and closed the hot and cold water pipes at the inlet and outlet of the water heater. They seemed...suspiciously stiff. I couldn’t even turn them. I suspect frozen pipes, and frozen pipes aren’t good, not good at all. So I get our hair dryer (thank goodness Jessie has hair) and start warming up the brass valves until I can turn the handles. After a little coaxing, the valves turn, and I open up one of the auxiliary valves and expect to see water gushing out of it. After I get it all the way open and still no water flows through, I begin to suspect we may have more cold here than I originally expected.

It was then that I noticed that the inflow vent, the one that lets air in so that the water heater can burn the gas and then vent it out, is right next to the pipes, and the air that it has been letting in is beyond freezingly cold. They are insulated, but the air outside is down around 17 degrees, and has been blowing in this vent for a few hours. I quickly get to work ripping off the insulation and hitting the pipes with the hair drier. Before long, opening the cold water valve reveals a blast of water that kinda made a mess of everything, but wasn’t bad, other than that. I even managed to get the heater working by pulling on the pressure release valve and having it dump hot water to the outside of the house. Hooray! But still no hot water inside? Yep, turns out the hot water outflow was frozen too. We hadn’t been running our water and everything got all gunked up. It’s a good thing the new pipes were plastic, or we may have been looking at a proper set of burst pipes. Yikes.

So that was my Wednesday evening adventure, and I did feel like something of a superhero after fixing the water problem so that we didn’t have to call the plumber in the morning and also so that we didn’t have exploding pipes. I just left a little space heater in the closet with the water heater to make sure it didn’t re-freeze overnight. And yes, I woke up and checked it at 1 in the morning just to be sure that no insulation was catching on fire or anything.

Which brings us to the *friday* adventure. Thursday had been pretty cold, and the weather was calling for a chance of some snow with proper accumulation and everything. So Jess and I went to sleep at our regular hour, assuming that if it was just a light dusting we’d still be going to work in the morning. Well we woke up at 7 and I checked outside and sure enough, we had snow. And not just a light dusting, either. A full inch, which is just enough, when combined with the very, very cold weather, to turn the roads into skating rinks. Snow day! I checked my work e-mail and discovered that, yes, the office was closed for the day. If I was a little bit more clever I would have remembered to enable remote login on my computer so that I could have gotten some work done today, but there’s no changing the past. I’m doing my best, therefore, to enjoy my impromptu three day weekend. We’ve stared by making some morning waffles, which were great, even though the experimental banana filling made kind of a mess of everything.

And after our breakfast, Jess decided...she wanted to go back to sleep. She’s been out for the last two hours. I tell you, she is a *trooper* when it comes to work. I’m sure she could have easily slept an extra two or three hours for the past week, but barring a couple of times where she had to take a break from work to take a 1.5 hour nap in the car (she was *tired*) she’s been up and at work every day without complaint. I give it 33% odds Jess goes into labor *at work*.

Oh, and in the few minutes I’ve been typing this, the temperature has climbed above 32 degrees, and everything is already starting to melt. We did take some pictures, though, and I’ll put some up later.

-N