You are reading the words of a person who thinks the main reason for civilization is hot running water, so please don’t take me for a water tee-totaler. It’s just really easy to lower your water consumption, and in the case of hot water fixtures, to lower your energy costs as well.

• Replace your older toilets with low-flow models. Toilet flushing accounts for a huge portion of your water use. Well designed low flow toilets work, as we in this area allegedly say, pissah. Please see our information on products we like for our toilet recommendations. New low flow models can use as little as 1 gallon per flush, and all low flows use 1.6 gallons or less. If you have a toilet of the 1970’s in your house, you are using 3.5 gallons for every flush, a toilet of the 1940’s will use up to 5 gallons for each flush. A 1920’s model (with the tank attached to the wall and a chrome elbow between the tank and the bowl) will use 6 gallons or more per flush, even with that half gallon milk jug full of  pebbles you put in there… Switch your 5 gallon model for a 1.6 and you’ll save 34 gallons in a ten flush day. Multiply by 365 and you save 12,410 gallons per year. For one toilet. Just saying.

• Replace aerators on your kitchen and bathroom sink spouts with new lower flow models. An aerator forces the water stream to pass through a series of restrictors and screens which breaks up the stream, increases the velocity and adds air to it. The result is a bit like whipped butter- more volume from the same amount of material; you use less without noticing. Replacement aerators come in half gallon per minute increments, so you can experiment with what works best for which faucet. New faucets may not accept a standard aerator but most new faucets already have low flow aerators on them.

• Upgrade your showerhead. Energy saving and water saving come together in your shower. There are a million kinds of showerheads, and a good plumbing showroom will have displays where you can see and feel what comes out of different models. A new showerhead is rated for 2.5 gallons per minute. Reputable companies, like Grohe, make excellent shower fixtures, even “rain shower” heads that use only 2.5 gallons per minute.

• Choose water saving appliances. Dishwashers and clothes washing machines use way less water than they used to. You do know that a typical top loader uses 40 some gallons for one large load? A new front loader can use as little as 15 gallons per load. This is another place where you get double savings for using less hot water as well.

• Check yourself.  Don’t let the water run when you are not using it. Just do the math. If your bathroom sink faucet lets out 2.5 gallons a minute and you brush your teeth for 2 minutes twice a day that’s 10 gallons of water a day to brush your teeth. Think you need that much? How about if we multiply by 365? You can do that in your head: 3,650 gallons of water just for the teeth of one American. What if you had to carry that to your bathroom in a 5 gallon bucket at 42 lb. per trip (for a 30,441 lb. total)? Who needs a gym? Same thing but worse washing dishes- worse because people take longer to do the dishes. At 2.5 gallons a minute for twenty minutes, let’s see…50 gallons-that’s more  than a load of laundry. If you can’t feel good about using a dishpan, use the dishwasher- that will really save you water. (But see the Swedish study about child immunity and automatic dishwashers for another side to this debate).

• Don’t water your lawn when it’s raining. They have moisture sensors to keep your lawn sprinklers from coming on when they don’t have to. Better yet, landscape to save water, be more pollinator friendly and cut back on having to mow grass. These folks can help.

• Harvest water. I know where you can get water for free. Tons of it. Ask us, and we’ll help you take advantage of this free offer. Operators are standing by at Pipelines.

I don’t even know where to start with the subject of water service. We are lucky and spoiled with the quantity, quality and ridiculous low price of the water that comes into our houses in Boston. If you’ve ever lived in another part of the world, or even a part of this country where water is scarce, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. If not, take my word for it, it’s a sin to waste water.

If you don’t believe that, how about this? You get charged for water and you get charged for sewer use at the same time. So preventing water leaks saves you double money and double karma.

How can you tell if you have leaks? Do you know where your water meter is?

Your meter has a small indicator (often orange) on its dial called a telltale. The telltale will move when even a small amount of water passes through the meter. If you see that moving when no water is being used in the house, something is amiss. (Good to do this test when no one else is home, no laundry or dishwasher is on, so you know nothing should be running.  

• Is a toilet letting water pass out of its tank? It is harder to see water running down the side of the toilet bowl than it is to see it dripping out of a faucet spout. You may be able to hear the water running in the toilet- there are people in the world for whom that sound is not a high alert (hard for a plumber to believe, but true). The gushing, waterfall sound means the flapper which shuts off the drain hole in the tank isn’t closed, or you may hear a high pitched hiss or whistle/squeal, sometimes quite faint, which tells you the fill valve isn’t shutting off. Take off the tank lid and look inside (nothing bad will happen). There is a tube about the diameter of a quarter which is there to lead excess water out of the tank so it can’t overflow. Is the water in the tank running over the top of the tube? The fill level or the fill valve itself needs to be adjusted/ replaced. An enormous amount of water can pass through a toilet every hour, and repairs are usually not difficult. Even if you suspect the toilet is letting a small amount of water pass through, but can’t be sure, you can test by putting a few drops of food coloring into the tank. Leave the toilet alone for 20 minutes or so (don’t flush). If the food coloring makes its way into the bowl, the flapper should be adjusted or replaced.  

• Shut off your garden hoses between uses. If you leave a rubber or plastic hose with water pressure in it, you are asking too much of the hose. If you leave a garden variety nozzle on the end of the constantly charged hose, you are asking for a leak which may never show itself as the nozzle lies in the pile of leaves where the hose is.

• Dripping faucets not only waste water, they waste energy if they are leaking from the hot side.

• A constantly dripping faucet will eventually erode the surface against which it is supposed to shut, so repairing it will require more time and more parts. If left to run long enough, the stream of water can even erode and weaken the drain pipes it runs down. Not kidding, you are making the grand canyon in your own house.

If ever there was a time for a pipe in your house to freeze, the winter of 2014-15 was it. It was very, very cold for long periods of time, and there were extremely windy days as well. If nothing in your house was affected by the weather this winter, you can stop reading now…or not. We have seen all sorts of reasons for pipes to freeze, and many of them involve human error- your house may be subject to one of these conditions in the future and I hope we can help you avoid the disaster that is a freeze-up.

Why freezing damages things.
Water is weird stuff- it is a liquid that gets less dense when it turns to a solid. That’s why ice floats, but more to the point here, when water freezes it gets bigger– it expands and that expansion is pretty unstoppable. I have seen every cast iron radiator in a house in Boston burst by ice. Those folks were lucky that the house didn’t start to thaw out before they caught the problem. About the only thing worse than having your house freeze is having it freeze and then thaw so the water now runs out of the breaks and finishes destroying the house that way.

Conditions that allow otherwise good pipes to go bad:

Air leaks at the basement sill. The sill is the big horizontal chunk of wood sitting on your foundation, on top of which the rest of the house is built. Nowadays, the junction between the masonry and the wood should be well sealed, which is easier to do with a concrete foundation than with a fieldstone or rubble one, but earlier concrete foundations also have voids and nothing sealing them to their sills. In New England, our old stone foundations have crumbling mortar, missing pieces and great whopping cracks where the buildings have settled, not to mention unplugged holes from the removal of oil fill pipes, roof drains and outside faucets. Place a pipe in the laser of cold air coming through one of these penetrations and it’s no wonder the pipe freezes. Add “insulation” to the basement (see drawing) in an ignorant way and you have guaranteed disaster by actually insulating the pipe into the cold. A majority of your pipes have to pass along the outside walls of the house, because that’s where the radiators, kitchen sink and bath fixtures are, so they are susceptible to abuse by bad insulators. Proper air sealing of your sills is a number one way of protecting your pipes and saving energy. 

Basement windows and doors. As our heating equipment gets less wasteful we lose a source of heat in our basements. The old 30’s converted coal burner and great honking pipes left from the gravity circulation system used to pee off enough heat to keep everything from freezing, but now the boiler has some insulation on it and new pipes have a lot less surface area; the cold entering through the rotted, uncaulked, cracked and (you know who you are) broken paned windows can reach the pipes passing by and freeze them but good. Likewise the un-weatherstripped door which lets the wind whip the cobwebs into a frenzy. The water pipes passing over that door have no chance on a 5°F day. There are good people whom you can hire to glaze the windows, or better yet, put in insulated, sealed, double paned numbers that will keep the cold out. The same folks can improve your basement doors so that your heat will stay in and the pipes will stay warm.

Piping in former porches or overhanging bays. That porch used to be outdoors, hanging in space, nothing below it to keep it warm, then someone closed it in, but it’s still hanging out with nothing below to warm it. We’ve seen heating pipes left out in the open below former porches, water pipe stapled to the bottom of floor joists and left with only lattice closing off the perimeter. Even if the space is fully closed in, is it fully insulated? The more exposed surface a room has, the greater the heat loss and the larger the risk of freezing temperatures at the perimeter (where the pipes are).

Piping in and above crawl spaces. Much the same as above. If even a small stretch of pipe is exposed in an unheated/ drafty crawl space, that piece can freeze. Frigid air from a crawl space can enter through cracks in floor boards and joints between floors and walls (where the pipes are).

Human error.  The worst thing we do is set our thermostats too low on very cold and especially on windy days. If you feel the walls facing the outside on such a day you will notice how cold they are, especially if there is no insulation. The inside of the outside facing walls is colder than the middle of the room where the thermostat is. Much colder. Wind causes even more heat loss through those walls. (You know how the weather people are always talking about wind chill? It works for buildings, too.) Things like heating pipes and kitchen water pipes will be vulnerable long before the thermostat knows there’s trouble. It is much cheaper to pay for the heat to keep the room at 65° than it is to replaster the house. And replace the floors. And the radiators. And the sink traps and toilet tanks, etc., etc. The laws of thermodynamics apply to us equally, and as always, ignorance is no defense. If you fall into one or more of the categories listed below, you are a likely scofflaw. Pay attention, the fines are brutal.

• Winter vacationer, particularly February school vacation, when the weather may fluctuate between mildish and very cold, and you may be tempted away from thermostat vigilance.
• Students/ new tenants. May be unaware of laws of thermodynamics. May not focus on their responsibilities to the building vs. the heating bill.
• Folks from places down South, including equatorial climes. If you have never experienced winter, you will have no idea what can happen to a house when it gets too cold.
• First time homeowners/ owners new to a home. You won’t know the peculiarities (which cabinet doors to leave open, which faucet to leave a drip) of a new home until you’ve spent a winter in it. It’s a good idea to ask the previous owners if there is a protocol for avoiding frozen pipes in the house.
• Renovators. Beware the contractor who tells you you won’t need that heat in the kitchen, or bathroom, or entry hall with the second floor bathroom water pipes running through it.
• Nest thermostat. Having a Nest thermostat does not give you a free pass to the Land of Ignorance. You need to think about what the temperature is throughout your house. The Nest doesn’t know about anything but what’s right in front of it. See thermostat section in Knowledge for more thoughts on the Nest.

Solutions

• Insulate professionally, insulate, insulate. Insulate the perimeter, heat the interior. Warm hat, coat and mittens, good lunch in the stomach. How else can I say this?
• Run piping in heated areas only. Reroute pipes that constantly freeze. Some day, someone will forget to leave the cabinet door open, or the heat tape plugged in, or the hot tap running and that sucker will freeze and break again. Why pretend otherwise? Fingers in the ears is more expensive.
• Add heat to your basement. Yes. Especially if you change to a high efficiency heating system that keeps its heat to itself. Your first floor will attempt to heat the basement, because hot goes to cold. If you insulate the basement ceiling to keep the first floor heat in, you will exacerbate the cold in the basement and put the basement piping at greater risk.
• Frost alarm. For very little outlay, you can get a device that attaches to your phone and will call you when the temperature in your house drops below 40. Home security systems may have an option like this. Your Nest and other thermostats of that type will send alerts to your phone that the temperature has dropped below the desired point.
• Get a real (reliable) human being to check on your house in cold weather. This one is the most foolproof. Have the person check in every day you are gone. Takes 5 minutes. Bring them back a nice gift. I cannot tell you the amount of damage a frozen house can sustain, except to say it can approach a tear down.

• Once more- seal and insulate the outside, heat the inside, move vulnerable pipes to a safe place, have someone check to be sure the heat is on while you are away, and your house will be safe from damage.

Time is money when it comes to plumbing repairs. Though parts can be expensive, labor is always the largest portion of your bill. Anything you can do to help us complete our work quickly will pay for itself on the final bill. Here are some ideas to help get us in and out of your house more efficiently. 

• Clear areas where we will have to work– in and under kitchen or bathroom sink, around water heater or heating boiler. Remove tchotchkes from radiator covers- if the heating system needs to be drained and refilled, we will need to access every radiator to bleed the air from them. Moving your belongings and keeping them safe will take us extra time and cost you more in labor.
• Make a list of things you’d like us to do and email it to us so we know what to expect ahead of time and can come prepared to fill the time productively.
• Sequester your pets and children, especially if they like to help (or in the case of pets, if they like to escape). We like pets and children, but don’t want to charge you for watching them.
•  Know what type of heating system you have (see whatayagot heat). If you can tell us what type of fuel your system uses, whether you have hot air or hot water heat, what type of heating elements your house has, we can start the diagnosis over the phone, perhaps help you solve the problem remotely, tell whether the problem can wait for regular hours or if it needs to be taken care of immediately. Knowing basic information can help us bring the right materials with us, saving travel time to a supply house.
•  Know what type of toilet you have. Keep a folder with information about model numbers for the fixtures and faucets in your house. If we can come with the parts, or if we order them and then schedule a time to come, no time will be wasted on travel or on the phone with suppliers.
•  If you have a phone with a camera, you can take pictures of the item needing repair and email the pictures to us. Our suppliers can help us identify the item and get us parts.
•  Know the location of emergency shutoffs for all the systems in your home. Don’t pile things in front of them. If you have a finished basement with shutoffs behind doors or above ceilings, write down the locations, or better yet, label them so someone coming to do repairs, a house sitter, or your kids can find them quickly.
• Do not wait to call about an ongoing problem after work hours or on a Friday afternoon. If you can, please call us when we are fully staffed and supply houses are open. Do not do “home repairs” that turn into emergencies on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. (You know who you are.) If you call us outside of business hours, we are going to have to charge you overtime rates, and we may not be able to locate parts, or may have to do a temporary repair that requires a second visit.