Keeping Your Water Pipes Intact: Burst Prevention Tips

A burst water pipe is no laughing matter. Not only does a broken pipe soak and flood places in your home and office, but since this usually occurs during winter, which means that it also ends up freezing over and icing up. The problems you face when your pipes break include soaked furniture, appliances, important papers, flooring, and so on. You may also find yourself with these very same things frozen over.

When this happens, you need to call experts who know how to handle water damage. What you may not be aware of is that you can actually try to prevent this from occurring. If you want to try and keep this from happening, you can do so with this list of tips:

• Don’t turn off the heat in your home when you are going out – some people try to save a few dollars by turning down the heat in their homes when they step out. This should not be done during really cold days since this can lead to burst water pipes. Keep your heat on, even at a low yet warm temperature, to prevent pipes from breaking.
• Find and insulate or heat up pipes that are exposed to cold weather – if you have pipes that are found outdoors, or are in areas that are not heated, you will need to either turn these off, insulate them, or heat them up. To heat up your pipes, use heat cables, which is a heating cable that you wrap around your water pipes to keep this from getting too cold and freezing over.
• Open sink cabinet doors to keep pipes underneath warm – one thing some people tend to forget is that heat cannot easily penetrate closed doors, so closed cabinet doors leading to the underside of your sink may result in frozen pipes underneath your sink. On cold days, open these cabinet doors so that the heat in your home can get to the pipes found there. You can also do this at night before you sleep so that your pipes don’t freeze and burst while you are asleep.
• Keep water running at a trickle somewhere in your home – did you know that running water does not freeze over as quickly as still water? Another trick that you can use to help prevent your pipes from freezing and bursting is to have a faucet in your home open slightly at all times. Even a trickle can help prevent freezing pipes since it keeps the water flowing in these.
• Keep cold air out by sealing leaks in vents – some people forget that drafts can actually freeze pipes as well, and can cause these to break. Before winter arrives, any leaks in your vents and in areas where your pipes are found, should be sealed off to keep your pipes from getting exposed to cold temperatures.

These are just a few of the things you can do to help prevent water pipes from breaking and from water flooding your homes in Little Rock, Hot Springs, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. If even after all these preventive measures, you still find yourself with a burst pipe and some flooding in your home, contact Chenal Restoration for help. Call us today at 501-509-8855 or get in touch with us through our contact page.