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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's cold enough to start freezing things inside then make sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken flooding pipes on top of no power. Can find more tips here: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergen... Good luck (and happy birthday)!

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Also, leaving water trickling when you’re on a septic system can ruin your grinder pump because it stirs up the solids in the first separating tank. And, as I learned the hard way this week, even if all the faucets are dripping, there’s no way to trickle a toilet. The supply lines for both of our toilets froze while the sink next to them kept right in dripping. And then there’s the question of how to keep your water heater from bursting when the power goes out and it can’t heat anything.

Ooph, yeah this is going to be a nightmare for home insurance to unwind it all and deal with everything at such a big level.

> there’s no way to trickle a toilet

If you have a tank toilet you might be able to adjust the floater (bend the rod upwards) so it never quite turns off the supply valve. Failing that, you can just manually prop the flap open with something.

If you have a flushometer, remove the nut over the valve and adjust the screw underneath until the valve never quite shuts off.

Warning: Take careful note of exactly how things were before. A toilet that never stops running can be just as hard on the spirit as a toilet that doesn't work at all.

I guess that’s true. But the alarm on our septic starts screaming after about six hours of a trickling toilet. The alarm is pretty much there for that specific condition and the installer really hammered on the need to fix a leaking toilet Immediately. I guess in the grand scheme of things a new grinder pump and a visit from the honey wagon are cheaper than a condemned house, though...

Otherwise there are folks who would let the toilet run for a year without fixing it.

Doesn't that simply means water and sewage treatment are also too cheap?

No, it just means people act human.

For a couple of cents, couldn't the grinder circuit include a basic 555 timer de-bounce circuit to suppress multiple triggers within, say, 30 minutes? That seems a lot cheaper than an alarm.

Alternatively, why doesn't the grinder have a higher minimum triggering flow rate? It seems it's falsely detecting potential solids arrival.

It’s not that it “stirs up solids,” it’s that a continuous leak causes the pump to cycle on more frequently. Your pump might cycle a few times a day normally; a running toilet could cause that to be every 30 min, and at that rate you could need a new pump in a year or two instead of 10.

Trickling your faucets (just a drip-drip-drip) for a few days is a small amount of extra wear on your pump in exchange for not rupturing pipes.

Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve, given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the pipework is?

Water expands about 9% when it freezes. It's not a question of pressure relief, it's a question of the pipe bursting in multiple locations as it freezes end to end if you have lost heat in the house. The pipes don't leak until the ice melts.

I don't think relief valve will help with freezing pipes. Freezing pipes burst because ice is less dense than water, so water expands as it turns into ice. Pipes freeze on the outside first, resulting in remaining water being entrapped in ice. As remaining water freezes, it can't move into relief valve.

I'm not thinking of a mechanical valve - a burst disc essentially is an engineered weak point, designed to fail first. It would have enough clearance for the ice to be forced out through it, and be in a location with sufficient drainage that water damage would be minimised when the ice melts.

It sounds like the answer is that to be effective, you'd have to put too many of them along the length of the pipework.

PEX handles freezing pretty well

That's not recommended for some areas of Texas. There's low water pressure and water has to be conserved.[1]

(Edit: Houston only.)

[1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/if-dripping-faucets-sav...

Be that as it may. Frozen pipes can be catastrophic.

Honestly probably better to store some water, run your pipes in a tiny stream, and then if you lose water at least your pipes will be drained.

There are issues with restarting a forced hot water furnace if you drain your pipes entirely.

Issues? You just need to restore water in the circuit and vent the air trapped in the radiators... really

Consult your local regulations of course. But frozen pipes are no joke and can turn a brand new, perfect home into a condemned tear-down, rebuild in a matter of hours.

Two units in my apartment building already flooded because they didn't trickle their water. Trickle means a tiny trickle of drops, not leaving the tap running. Use common sense, not FUD.

For those in that situation, turn off the water to your home and drain the pipes. Bursting pipes can do massive damage to your home and make it uninhabitable during the rehab.

There is what people that have vacation homes do in the winter, shut off the water and drain the water heater and pipes.

... and put a non-toxic antifreeze in the water traps (and seal the drains up) to prevent sewer gas from entering the house.

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