by Catherine Lear

Created on: December 02, 2009   Last Updated: December 03, 2009

There is nothing worse than coming home from work in winter and opening your front door to a deluge of cold water. Alas, this will happen to many homeowners this winter, this in turn will cost that homeowner a small fortune in repairs even worse if you have no insurance you will have to stand the cost yourselves.

However with a little bit of forethought and with a little bit of what my dad calls using own your noddle (that is using your own brains to you and me), we can all come home to a warm and dry house.

It is no use shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted (that's another saying that my dad uses) so well before winter sets in take a look at your plumbing and see if it is winter tight. Most homes will have a loft, in the loft there will be either copper pipes or plastic pipes that will carry water, in many homes there will be at least one or maybe two cold water tanks, if there are two one will be smaller, this one will be the expansion tank to your heating. From the tank there will be two pipes one will be the cold-water feed, the other one will be the expansion pipe that takes the expansion of the hot water, both these two pipes along with the small tank should be lagged with a good modern lagging. The other tank will also have two pipes again one will be the feed pipe. The other will be the pipe that takes the water from your tank to your cold water pipes and to your hot water cylinder. Again, make sure that all the pipe work is lagged as well as the tank.

The loft will be one of the coldest places in your home, you will or should have put down a good thick fibre lagging in between the rafters in the loft, and this is why your loft will be the coldest place and the most susceptible for freezing. As all the warmth of your home is stopped from escaping through your roof.

Your other pipes in your home should be safe from the winter cold; there is no need to lag any pipes that are on show, as your home while you are in it will be warm.

In addition, that brings me to one more point. Many homeowners will take a short winter break, leaving there home with no heating. All homes with a heating boiler should have a frost thermostat, which will bring on your heating when the weather just begins to fall below freezing; as long as your heating turns itself on at this point, you should be safe from frozen water bursts.

Many homeowners will forget the outside of their homes, there we are well tucked up in our warm homes well away from the cold winter months, and we forget about the outside tap and hose that we use in the summer months for watering the garden and washing our cars.

Make sure that you turn off any outside tap to your hose reel, many homeowners will during the summer months leave the tap running on the hose real after all the hose will have its own tap or nozzle on the end. The big freeze will come and freeze the water in your hose. When we have a spell of weather that melts the ice, your hose will burst, while this will not do any damage to your inside of your home it will if left make a mess in your garden, along with the bill for the lost water if you are on a water meter.

Never let your home insurance run out, winter will be the time of year when you might need it. It is also advisable to ask a friend to pop in now and again if you take a small vacation, just to see that everything is all right. Make any changes to your home well before winter sets in autumn is the time of year that tells you that winter is well on its way do what other animals do, they winterize the habitat.

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