Closing Up Right To Prevent Freeze-Ups

So you think you’ve buttoned up your house for winter?Yes, you’ve weather-stripped your doors and windows, cleaned out the gutters and checked their pitch, caulked around casings, and changed the rotation to clockwise on ceiling fans to blow warm air downward. Window air-conditioning units have been removed with their filters and coils cleaned, condensers have been covered, hoses have been removed and emptied of water, and hose bibs have been drained and shut off.

You’ve even had your stand-alone generator serviced to make sure the power will stay on during an outage. So what could go wrong? Plenty—especially in an unoccupied second home.

Despite doing all of the above, you receive a call from the fuel oil company telling you they can’t do their regular bi-weekly fill-up since your tank is full. “We think you’ve have a freeze-up. You better get someone over there to check it out.”

I shuddered after receiving that call last February about the family house in northwestern New Jersey. In 38 years we never had a freeze-up, but the conditions leading up to the freeze had been extraordinary and unrelenting. There had been 10 consecutive days of subzero temperatures. On the day of the call, the temperature was 13 degrees below zero in the morning. The insulated oil line from the aboveground tank had gelled from the cold—and then both the boiler and furnace shut down.

I had done all the right things, according to my plumber. When I left the house two weeks earlier I turned the water off, something that should always be done in any house with well water. I ran most of the faucets until the water drained out. Flushing all of the toilets would have helped, but I flushed only two of them. Running the water in the fixtures relieves the pressure to the point of preventing pipes from bursting, but that doesn’t mean that pipes won’t separate at the joints anyway since some residual water remains.

When my builder and plumber arrived late that afternoon everything was frozen solid. The hot water heater was cracked, the water-softening canisters had split open, the boiler had cracked, the seals on the toilets were destroyed, faucet levers had frozen beyond repair and there were multiple pipe breaks throughout the entire house. Had the water not been turned off, we would have walked into a house of frozen water and the damage could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of expense, potentially rendering the house a teardown.

The oil company, swamped with emergency calls, couldn’t come to the house until late that night, but they were able to restart the furnace, which heats one small wing of the house. The next day they deemed the cast-iron boiler, which heats two-thirds of the house, a total loss, as it was cracked, with water leaking all over the mechanical room. The plumber brought heaters for every bathroom because the rest of the damage really couldn’t be assessed until the place thawed out.

I called my insurance agent and we filed a claim. Since the company had no staff person in this remote area, an independent adjuster was assigned to my claim. I was interrogated over the phone by the adjuster regarding the condition of the house when I was last there. I had to document that the house was on automatic fill-up with the oil company by sending the adjuster three previous paid invoices. The plumber also confirmed the fact that the water had been shut off when I left the premises.

Aside from the shock of seeing so much damage to the house and knowing full well how much it would cost to repair, the initial contact with the adjuster filled me with dread. I had to wonder if the claim would be covered. It was, but the adjuster initially allotted only $15,000 for the work. I told him that, as an architect, I thought his numbers were way off. He came to the house several times and met with the plumber, who insisted that the majority of the plumbing had to be replaced. Pressure testing could be done, but why would you want to save 80-year-old copper pipes full of lime scale and corrosion?

The adjuster came back again with the company’s building consultant and engineer. They too wanted to do pressure testing. While it made sense on the heating loops, it seemed ridiculous for the domestic water runs, where all of the pipe bursts were visible once we opened access panels. I also told them I didn’t want to test the lines in my living room ceiling because the pipes traveled over display cabinets lined with silk velvet. I asked if they would pay to rebuild and re-line those cabinets should residual water leak during pressure testing? There was dead silence. The benign solution was to remove the living room ceiling to access the pipe breaks.

The adjuster backed off the testing, but the building consultant told me he figured on $3,000 to replace and install the boiler. I restrained myself from asking him if he was out of his mind and said the existing boiler had cost $6,000 16 years ago and that a new unit would be almost double that today. I asked if he had taken the model number and the BTU output data off of the existing boiler and he sheepishly told me “no.” I suggested that he revisit his pricing of the boiler.

In time I made the insurance company representatives understand the complexity of the fix in an old house with broken pipes going through stone walls, down into a slab with quarry tile flooring and then back up again into the ceiling plenum. The pipes under the slab broke, so the whole floor had to be replaced. I kept thinking about the people who have no knowledge about construction and how upsetting it would be to hear that they were not going to receive enough funds to fix their damaged homes with “in kind” construction and materials. Homeowners who have difficulty with a company adjuster do, in fact, have the recourse to hire an independent adjuster who would work for them to establish a reasonable cost for the claim.

As for me, the plumbing job had to be bid out again since my plumber became ill during the summer and couldn’t work. After I spent six months battling the insurance company, the repairs have finally started, and hopefully the plumbing will be done by the end of the month. The reconstruction of ceilings and panels along with painting may take until Thanksgiving.

Although the insurance company would not pay for it, the aboveground oil tank will be replaced with a vertical unit placed in the heated garage. Even oil lines with heat tapes can fail, especially during a prolonged power outage. If one has space inside the house to relocate an outdoor tank it should be give serious consideration.

For anyone with a security system, heat sensors are a must. I had heat sensors for fire detection, but they were never connected to the central monitoring station. In addition to replacing those older units, I have since added heat-sensing thermostats that can be remotely monitored and programmed from an app on my smartphone. If it’s extremely cold the thermostats can be raised with the click of a button.

Options with these devices also include arming and disarming the security system so no one needs to have the code except for you. The doors can also be locked and unlocked remotely through the app. The system can also notify a homeowner about power failures, low batteries or tampering with the systms. Energy sensors can also monitor for doors and windows left open and adjust the thermostat accordingly so as not to waste energy.

If no one were to live in a second home during the winter months then it would be worthwhile to hire a licensed plumber to winterize the house.

With all of the new technologies that have become available at a reasonable cost, an ounce of prevention can really prevent freeze-ups and a ton of cure.

Anne Surchin, an East End architect, is vice chair of the Southold Landmarks Preservation Commission, and is currently working on a companion book to “Houses of the Hamptons 1880-1930.”