&*@$%@* FROZEN PIPES!

Sorry I haven't posted lately but I have been sliding on my back through a freaking crawl space in a failed attempt to thaw out our frozen pipes. Do I sound bitter? I hope so, because I am. Well, not really bitter per se. But I also can't say I'm thrilled-over-the-moon happy about it.

We had already made it through several weeks of frigid weather. Below zero every single day, wind chills into the negative double digits. Cold. Really, really, really cold. And our pipes had emerged unscathed. Maybe we got cocky and good ol' Karma came around to kick us in the butts. Maybe it was just too danged cold for too danged long. Whatever the case, we came home last week to frozen pipes. Nuts.

Most of our pipes run through the cellar. Some of them run through an unheated crawl space. The pipes themselves are insulated, but you probably know (as we did) that insulation alone isn't going to keep a pipe from freezing in -10 degrees. So we piled bales of straw around our foundation in an attempt to provide a little extra insulation. I honestly thought that'd do the trick. Apparently I thought wrong. We discovered the big freeze on Wednesday evening. Thursday I decided to stay home and try to thaw them out. First I tried heat in the crawl space. It was like trying to heat the outdoors. No go. Then, I tried going into our laundry area, the most suspect area I could think of in terms of the probable location of the freeze, and directing heat at the pipes as they came out from the floor. I figured that since copper conducts heat, eventually the heat would make its way down the pipe and thaw it out. Nope. So then I was faced with the not-enviable task of crawling under the house with said space heater. Let me tell you how NOT warm the ground in an uninsulated crawl space is. I put down plastic so I wouldn't have to scoot on my back through God-knows-what, but it did not protect against that cccccooooollllllldddd ground. I pulled the insulation off, tried to thaw the pipes out directly. No luck. I think they were freezing as fast as I could get one area thawed.

At that point I gave up on the idea of thawing them out manually, and resigned myself to waiting them out. But wait!, I thought, I can at least protect them so this doesn't happen again. Off I went in search of heat tape. It would seem as though everyone in our metropolitan area had the same wondrous idea. I went to no fewer than 15 hardware stores, from the big-box places all the way to the mom-and-pop places, and every single store was completely out of heat tape! I'm actually on a wait list for it, if you can believe it. If anyone would have ever told me I would be on a wait list for flipping heat tape I would have laughed. Not laughing now--no sir!

Maybe my next post can be about something from which I emerge victorious. I sure hope so.