Today’s video is for mobile homeowners. It’s starting to get cold. It got down to about 30 degrees — which is cold, but not terrible unless you live in a mobile home and your heat tape is not plugged in, or you don’t have a heat tape on your line.
What Is Heat Tape, and How Can It Prevent Frozen Water Lines?
You see, there’s a water line that goes from where your water comes from that runs underneath your mobile home and then plugs in usually right underneath your hot water heater. Mobile homes are notorious for freezing up a lot easier than a regular house when it starts dipping below freezing.
One thing you want to do is you want to make sure you have a heat tape on that line. You want to make sure that the heat tape is plugged in and that it is working. You can usually tell if it’s working by plugging it in and simply putting your hand around the pipe, and you’ll feel just a little bit of heat, and that’s all it takes to stop it from freezing.
So what you want to do as a precaution for when it does get really cold is you want to leave just a little trickle of water running on a hot bathtub. It needs to be more than a drip, but basically the smallest stream you can make should be enough to stop the lines from freezing up. And that’s my tip on that.
What Can You Do if Your Water Line Freezes?
Now, if your line does freeze up — you wake up early in the morning and you have no hot or cold water — there are various things you can do.
One thing you’d want to do is look and see how warm it’s going to get that day. If it looks like it’s going to warm back up to 40-50 degrees, what you want to do is (if you’re going to be home) leave a hot and cold faucet open, preferably on a bathtub. And as the line unthaws, it’ll start dripping; and in a very short period of time, it’ll flush the ice out and you’ll be fine.
However, what can happen when your lines freeze up is the lines expand and they get bigger. And that’s how you get ruptures in a pipe. When a line freezes up, you don’t have a leak. It’s when the line thaws, that’s when you do have a leak. So another good thing to know is that you need to know how to turn the water off to your mobile home before you have an emergency and a broken line.
Need Help? Call Rocketman Plumbing!
So in order to prevent your water lines from freezing, use heat tape, keep a little trickle of water going, and know how to shut off your water. If you have a need for an emergency plumber, call Rocketman Plumbing at (505) 243-1227, and we’ll come out and we’ll fix the problem. We can put on heat tapes, insulate the pipe, and do whatever we need to do so your home does not freeze up and you have no problems.