When you live in a remote home off grid, you will gain an appreciation for life’s simple pleasures like running water and indoor plumbing for bathrooms. This is especially true when these things temporarily unavailable. You never really plan on them going away, but when they do there’s nothing worse than that sinking feeling you get with no water from the faucet. Needless to say, your plans for your coffee on this cold arctic morning evaporate!
Frozen water Input
The water from the cistern tank to the house is buried deep enough that freezing does not happen. There is a one inch PVC pipe inside a 4 inch flexible tube often used for gutters. The extra space creates an insulating ‘dead air’ space which is great insulation. When this comes out of the ground under the house, we have it wrapped with fiberglass insulation.
When the temperature gets to 10F or lower at night the 10″ fiberglass wrapped pipe has been known to freeze. Gaining access to this section under the house was very difficult. The first year we had this problem, the routine was to watch the temperature at night, and if it looked cold, make sure we had a few pitchers of water for the morning. When it froze I’d try to disconnect the input hose in the kitchen and pour some boiling water down. Fortunately, it never froze too hard, or it warmed up during the day, and water was restored.
Input solution
The second year of these episodes brought an obvious solution. I purchased a small 3 foot section of heat tape to wrap the 10″ hose before wrapping it back up with the fiberglass. The heat tape had a temperature sensor that made it safe for use on a non-metal pipe. Now we use the 15W tape on cold nights and never have problems unless we forget to plug it in.
Output Problem
Last year the cold snap in the beginning of winter brought a new problem. The 6 inch drain pipe under the house that runs into the septic tank, froze solid. When I crawled under the house and tapped on the drain pipe, it just made a ‘thud thud’ sound for a good 20 feet or more!
This was quite a dilemma! First, try was to use one of those small propane bottle torches to warm up the frozen section. It didn’t work well with schedule 80 (non metal) drain pipe. The pipe would make cracking sounds as the ice insde was warmed, but too much warming would start the pipe smoldering! This would take forever to melt 20 feet or more of 6 inch pipe and would probably result in holes melted through somewhere!
I Did some research and found that plumbers in Alaska used pressurized steam to clear frozen pipes. Good luck trying to find a machine for this purpose. Maybe some kind of modification for a carpet steam cleaner? I mentioned the situation to my friend who is a welder. He had a simple suggestion, that was much easier to try before other exotic solutions.
Output Solution
Simple, and it worked! Heat up the space beneath the house. The crawl space under my home varies from 1 to 3 feet, so there is enough room to safely put a space heater. There was a false 
start with a rented kerosene space heater that failed to start when in place.
Finally, I borrowed a 50,000 BTU propane space heater. It was small and light to drag around under the house. Since I didn’t know how long it would take, and you definitely want to keep a close eye on any heater under your home, I put a small wireless web cam under the house. The camera could look at the heater and a digital thermometer I put there.
It only took about two and a half hours, and the temperature was a toasty 80F when the drain began working. To summarize my solutions:
- Heat tape with temperature sensor to wrap and prevent freezing on the coldest of nights.
- Propane space heater, web camera, digital thermometer to warm up the crawl space when problems occur.
The heater below is similar to the one I used with great success. What a relief to end the two and a half day problem with the output plumbing!!
Have you ever used the steam method for your frozen pipes? I’d love to hear how that worked. Any other creative methods for frozen pipes? Please share, leave a comment.
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I admire people who can live off the grid like that. However, if I try it, I’ll experiment in warmer climates.
my dad has this problem annually as his drain is totally exposed to the septic for forty feet down. We no longer connect the pipes with cement and this allows us to wrap towels and pour boiling water on the pipes. The pipe is then disconnected at the joints, the icicle (shitcicle) then slides out and problem solved.
It is tough to bury drain pipes in canadian shield. Also re cistern hose, try getting the hose wood boilers use. They are super insulated and there are two one inch lines inside the six inch insulated pipe. If one freezes, disconnect and connect to the other line and then you have afresh hose available free of obstruction to restore your cistern line. If that freezes, the other line will in all liklihood will have melted by then and you can then use it again.
I love off grid living in cold climates since nobody really has the perfect system for worry free water. Most homes use heat lines to keep pipes from freezing, but off gridders don’t have the power to warm the pipes. Best advice, buy a place near a lake and keep a water hole open. When your bucket of water freezes solid bringing it back to the house, it is time to move to florida and open up a Tim Hortons!
Heat trace tape is likely the best system to use. Total wattage consumer is easily supplied by a small genset and it rarely takes a full 24 hours to melt the ice in a pipe. But be sure the heat covers all places exposed to cold. We recently moved into a place that had stood empty for six months. It had not been ‘winterized’ and naturally the pipes were frozen but no heat trace installed. It took a long while to discover a frozen section buried deep under 18″ of insulation was in fact also plugged with ice. Insulation will only keep heat in it will not create it. So the cold water pipe coming out of the ground had frozen after being unused for several months of frost. Up here it starts to freeze by early November and lakes have ice solid enough to walk on before December.
By Christmas you can drive vehicles over the ice.
Marshall, I’m not sure if this item belongs here or under generators but I have always favored watercooled gensets. The reason being the waste heat from the engine can be piped to remote locations where it can be useful instead of being wasted. For example the comment by Mike about the insulated double pipes used for wood boilers is a good example. Run hot water down the drain to melt the ice. I salvaged a back seat heater from an Astro Van. About $25 at the car wreckers and given the number of General Motors Vans built since 1990 is in abundant supply. The nice thing about it is the hose is 1/2′ size and the assembly has a 2 speed fan plus the radiator core all in one assembly. Hook up a hose in and out plus add 12V or change the fan to suit available voltage and you can disperse the hot air wherever you like. OR. . . . . .
Run the hot coolant into a marine hot water tank that has a heat coil inside or you can make your own ( we do) exchanger to fit an ordinary house hold hot water tank. The point being a liquid cooled genset is a real boon in the winter climates. House hold PEX for hot water is adequate for piping. Even a pressurized engine system only has 15 PSI and the thermostat os at 195F not above boiling PEX is rated for 200F and yoiu can get 165 degree thermostats for engine.
BTW the double pipe insulated duct for wood boilers can be made by hand. Now the cost becomes $5 per foot instead of $15 per foot. Use reflectix as the insulation. Requires a chain comealong a long pull rope and a bit of dexterity and finesse. Plus of course the required piping usually PEX. Best done in summer.
When I have frozen pipes I use a space heater which seems to work wonders. I want to thank people who have commented with other ideas of how to deal with frozen pipes, I will keep them in mind.