A number of houses in Ashefield are experiencing problems with frozen water pipes. If you are one of the unfortunate people, a standpipe has been made available outside house #35 – toward the Ashe road entrance to the estate (10am – 4pm). Update: this water should be available until 8pm.
Here are some tips for dealing with, and preventing frozen water supplies:
- If the stopcock is frozen, open the stopcock chamber in front of your house.
- Pour warm (not boiling) water onto the stopcock. This water may freeze quickly so try to use as little as possible.
- Fill the chamber with fibreglass, rock wool or other non-absorbent insulation. Don’t use an absorbent material e.g. old rags.
More tips for dealing with the freezing weather:
- In your attic, make sure that there is no insulation underneath the cold water tank. It can get extremely cold in the attic at night so allowing heat from below to rise up will help prevent the water tank from freezing.
- If you have a 60W or 100W incandescent light in your attic, you might consider leaving it switched on. The heat from it may be enough to keep the temperature above freezing point.
- Opening the attic trapdoor will allow heat from the main part of the house to enter and raise the attic temperature.
- Set your heating to come on for a short time during the night e.g. at 4am.
- For driveways, liberal use of dishwasher salt is proving to be a very effective solution. Driveways under snow and thick ice will need a lot of it though. Tesco own brand dishwasher salt is currently €1.25 for 3kg. Normal table salt is too fine for this job; coarse granules are required.
- Don’t leave running cars unlocked or unattended while waiting for them to heat up.
- Don’t use boiling water to defrost car windows; it may causing cracking or even worse, destroy the window.
- If you have any elderly neighbours, please do check in on them to make sure they have heating and essentials.