Avoiding Frozen Pipes

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nyzman

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Lake Placid, NY
Hello, I am purchasing a weekend-use cottage in northern NY and am looking for a way to keep the pipes from freezing while I’m away from the house. The crawl space under the kitchen has an electric hot water heater and a well pressure tank. One plumber advised that since I would be using the house every weekend, or every other weekend, I should shut off the main water supply when I leave, turn down heat to 52, shut off the well pump, open faucets, flush toilets, and put RV anti-freeze in the traps, and leave the hot water heater on. Is this sound advice? Is there something else that would be safer? Thanks in advance for any help!
 
I’m going to give you general advice.

Keep any piping you don’t want frozen above 32 degrees and if you can’t, drain it.

Keep it above 32 anyway you want.
 
If the crawlspace is sealed and in the conditioned space I would turn off water heater and well pump and install at least 1 wifi thermostat. Most of these stats have an adjustable low and high temp warning feature and will send text or email automatically if it drops to that level giving you plenty of time to get someone to physically check on it. You could leave a key with someone you trust in that area or hide it on site just in case.
 
I had a weekend home in central Michigan. It was a “modern build”, 1996. Built as a normal home, with normal plumbing, electrical, HVAC. I mention modern and normal since many homes in that area were built as cottages for seasonal use only. I had 6” insulated walls, double pane windows, and insulated crawl space walls (4' tall batt insulation on the block walls), etc. We never “closed” the home for the winter.

Gas water heater in garage. We wrapped that exposed plumbing with thermostatically controlled automatic UL listed heat tape. When leaving, we kept the heat at 52 degrees inside, turned off the breaker to the well pump, turned down the water heater to "VACATION" (lowest) setting. Crawl space vents closed, though it never got cold in the crawl space. While we never added antifreeze to the toilets we often added either white vinegar or bleach to prevent organic growth in the toilet bowls.

The only times we had frozen pipes was when power to the heat tape failed; it had been plugged into a garage GFCI that tripped. We changed that by plugging into an indoor outlet. This only happened when there was extended single digit temps… those were generally in those dangerous eight weeks of January and February, the worst part of winter in Michigan, and in most places.

In later years we were able to get high speed internet there, and an internet thermostat which allowed us to check things remotely. We augmented that with Wyze cameras too.

A lot of the protocols you will need depend on how well that house is built. Also, check with how your neighbors up state there deal with it as well…
 
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Regarding potential frozen pipes ......... two items I've truly learned to appreciate are Remote thermometers to monitor areas & thermo-cube thermostats that turn on at 35 degrees and off at 45.
For decades I kept a heat tape plugged in throughout the winter until I realized the area in question where the water enters never drops below 40 degrees unless it is well below zero outside.

Remote thermometer.jpegThermo-cube.jpg
 
For decades I kept a heat tape plugged in throughout the winter until I realized the area in question where the water enters never drops below 40 degrees unless it is well below zero outside.
The automatic, thermostatically controlled heat tape won't turn on until the temp goes below something like 38 degrees. So if you had had one of those, it would have never went on! Mine rarely went on. When it did, the thermostat "bulb" on it had a neon indicator...and you could see.
 
Any thoughts on brand of pipe-heating tape ? I need about 40ft.

This outfit seems to specialize in it:

https://www.briskheat.com/products/...speedtrace-self-regulating-heating-cable.html
... but the price is more than double what you can get it for at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073312DV...aWNrUmVkaXJlY3QmZG9Ob3RMb2dDbGljaz10cnVl&th=1
The cheaper stuff is undoubtably made in China, but the more expensive stuff doesn't necessarily say it's made somewhere else. This is obviously something where you want to pay for quality, but on the other hand, higher price doesn't necessarily mean higher quality. Is there a brand that the pros swear by ?
 
We used Frostex. You don't have to wrap around the pipe. Just tape it to the side of the pipe. It also has thermostat
that will bring it on and off.
 

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