How are you heating your home? Most methane furnace designs use electric blowers to actually get the heat into the home (at least in North America).
We could still cook food on our gas stove.
We still had hot water from our gas hot water heater (though the pipes eventually froze).
I thought it was more about lack of heat + insulation what about a pipe (absent other causes) makes it inherently more prone to freezing?
> in exterior walls with degraded insulation.
In places where it does regularly get below freezing for long stretches of time they do try and avoid putting water lines on exterior walls specifically for this reason.
I've only been to Austin + gotten gas around Amarillo on my way to ABQ, but as someone who's spent most my life in blue dots in red states, it's hard to put into words how angry that entire fiasco made me.
(And I'm someone who nearly did an MFA in Creative Nonfiction... I am very good at describing how I feel, it's a very purposeful exploitation of American libel law -- propaganda is the selective telling of truths, especially paired with our libel laws[1])
Anyways to swing it back to the article/thread:
Were you not able to run a thin stream of water?
I was lucky to have water included in every place I rented up til now, I used to joke if a landlord angers me I can set up a flywheel, but it also meant if it gets cold I'm not worried about cost if I switch it to the warm side and run a thin stream while I sleep or go out for espresso.
Orders of magnitude, I used to have an all electric apartment, using a fan versus AC was a 25 dollar difference or more. I used to do the math, and nursing an iced tea down the road during the hottest four hours of the day, some days, could pay for itself, but that was before the rents skyrocketed as scores of cost indifferent international students moved in just as I was moving out.
(Last I was in the town I'm referencing, it had gone from 500ish walkable to campus to more like 1K and littered with those damn scooters.)