by Catherine Lear

Created on: January 22, 2011   Last Updated: January 23, 2011

Frozen water pipes are one of the homeowner’s worst nightmares, when a frozen water pipe defrosts if not defrosted properly it can and often does ruin homes. It is after fire, the homeowner’s worst nightmare.

Frozen water pipes happen always in the winter months when the temperature drops below freezing and the exposed pipework with water in them freezes. In addition, it always will happen when the pipework is not insulated.

Before explaining how to defrost the pipework, a little bit of knowledge of what happens when a person either leaves the pipework to defrost on its own, or does not defrost the pipe work properly will help the reader to understand what to do or what not to do.

Firstly, the reader must understand how to spot pipework that has frozen water in it. The reader will first notice that something is wrong when they turn on one, or more of the taps in their home and no water appear, or if it does, it will only be a trickle. If this happens, it is imperative that the reader opens fully the water taps on that water circuit. The reason that they should do this is that frozen water will expand and the ice that has formed will have nowhere to go and will either split the pipe work in a number of places or push of fittings such as compression elbows or couplings. When the reader has opened one or more taps then the frozen water then has somewhere to go if caught in time.

When trying to find the spot where the ice has formed the reader must trace all the way along the pipework until they find one or more spots where the ice has formed. This will be easy to spot, as a frost will have formed on the outside of the pipework. Once spotted the reader should now just run their fingers along the pipework to see if the pipe has split, they will notice if the pipe has split if the pipe has bulged a little bit and a small piece of ice is protruding. If this is, what has happened then they must turn of the water supply to that particular pipe, if in doubt turn of the water supply to the home.

Defrosting the pipe work is quite easy and can be done in a number of ways. The first and easy way is just to turn on your heating and let the heat from your heating system defrost the pipework on its own; this should only be undertaken though if the pipe in question is not in fact on the heating system but on the water system that runs to the taps in the home.

The second way is to connect a hair dryer and quickly run the dryer close to the pipework about an inch from

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