How to Prevent Frozen Pipes

Series Summary

Home remodeling is a great way to repair and replace broken items in a home. Additionally, home remodeling can bring an outdated home to contemporary standards or can simply maintain the classic or historical look of the home. Home repair is often the last thing homeowners want to spend money and time on. However, as many DIYers know, homeowners can do their own home repair with instructions from home renovation and construction professionals. In this free video series, a home repair specialist and remodeling contractor provides tips for DIY projects around the house. Discover how to select carpet, ceramic tile, flooring and roofing for a home. Learn about repairing everything from gates and leaky faucets to clogged ice makers and dryer lint traps. Improve the way a home looks and functions with this home maintenance help.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Tim Gibson and I'm going to talk to you about how to prevent freezing pipes. Now, some of the basic things you can do in your home, in your bathroom where you have a lot of your pipes, in your walls, typically there's closets or other space on the other side of that. If it's a closet on the other side keeping those closet doors open to allow the heat in your house to circulate through those areas that's some preventative thinks you can do. Now when we actually get into pipes such as in garages or crawl spaces then there's some other things that you can do to help prevent freezing pipes there. The first would to be use pipe insulation such as you see here. This is foam insulation that wraps around the pipe and secures with some type of tape, in this case like a duct tape. Now if you are in some really cold climates where you have several days of below freezing weather, then the next step up from this would be to actually use an electrical tape that wraps around your pipes and then the electrical tape actually stays warm and keeps your pipe from freezing. Now some other things you can do, particularly in a crawl space, is you can take a lamp, just a utility lamp on an extension cord and place it up, actually hang it up, by your pipes and with a 100 watt bulb, in most cases, hung up near your pipes, if it happens to be near a foundation bed or something like that it will actually provide enough heat to keep that area from getting below freezing where it makes your pipes freeze. So I'm Tim Gibson with some tips on how to prevent your pipes from freezing."