Hosed by pipes

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Throughout my lifetime in Idaho, I can count on two fingers (especially the middle one) the number of times my pipes have frozen in the winter — and both have been at the rental in which I currently live.

We’ve been in this house since the summer of 2019, and while a Christmas tree looks nice in the living room, it is not always the greatest place in which to spend a winter. The pipes froze in mid-January 2023 and, despite every effort, didn’t start flowing again for almost a week. At least we got a day or two of staycation at a motel with a pool. Well, it happened again — I’m pretty sure on the precise anniversary of the previous incident — during our most recent cold snap.

My wife and I are not dummies. We were prepared for the weather this time around. We opened all the cupboards in the kitchen, put space heaters in strategic locations, kept the wood stove pumping out BTUs day and night, and dripped every faucet in the house. My dad even brought us four hay bales to pile around the under-insulated exterior wall that we assumed to be the focal point of our 2023 deep freeze. 

Still, on a recent Friday, we awoke to find that the drips had stopped and we’d been hosed by our pipes yet again.

Needless to say, I was unamused. I stormed out into the below-zero morning and stalked, grumbling, from store to store trying — and failing — to find heat tape. Still, I bought foam pipe insulation and foil-backed fiberglass pipe wrap, a new cover for the backyard faucet, indoor weather stripping, a mini-space heater and the second-to-last full-sized unit on the shelves at Walmart.

I took all that home and none of it did a damn thing. So I went to the bar.

There I commiserated with others who were undergoing their own arctic ordeals. Something we all had in common: living in early- to mid-20th century houses wherein the original builder-owners thought it was a good idea to feed the main water pipe through a north-facing wall. Our best theory for why that should be the case: Maybe Sandpoint people in the old days weren’t really used to indoor plumbing yet and didn’t care if they had to melt snow on the stove to wash their armpits.

In my case, whoever built the house I live in sometime around 1909 also decided to incorporate a crawl space with about 10 inches of clearance and didn’t bother to insulate any of it — especially under the kitchen and even more especially around that water pipe someone so ingeniously located not only on a wall that faces due north, but one that has probably never seen the sun. (Yet these are the homes that routinely sell for half-a-million dollars or more. Go figure.)

I suppose an 8-year-old coal miner in 19th-century Wales would have felt at home in my crawl space, but there was no way my six-foot-three, 190-pound, 43-year-old body was capable of getting down there — and certainly not wriggling the 20 or so feet from the entrance point to the pipe, and absolutely not with any device that could generate warmth.

To raise the temperature in that cat-and-mouse-turd infested underworld we had to position a box fan over the hatch and direct our most powerful space heater at its open maw.

We ran with this system — while also applying all the other seemingly ineffectual strategies we’d deployed — throughout the weekend and into the following Monday, when I showed up to work feeling unable to think because I’d had one shower in three days. Finally, on that Tuesday, the water started moving and we could stop dumping buckets of dirty snow melt into our toilet tanks to accomplish an adequate flush. It felt good to join the 1920s, but that’s life in a “Sandpoint house.”