Getting Your Porter Home Ready Before the Next Freeze, and What to Do If a Pipe Bursts

Houses in Porter, Kingwood, Atascocita and New Caney weren't built the way houses in Minnesota are built. Pipes here often run through exterior walls, attics and outdoor hose bibs with a lot less insulation around them than you'd find further north, because for most of the year that's never a problem. The problem shows up on the handful of nights a year when temperatures actually drop below freezing here, and Texas has had more than one of those in recent years that caught a lot of homes off guard.

What actually bursts, and why

Water expands when it freezes. A pipe that's full of water and sealed at both ends, whether by a closed valve or just by the water itself freezing solid in a section, has nowhere for that expansion to go except outward, against the pipe wall. Copper and PEX both fail under that pressure, usually right at a joint or a fitting, and usually somewhere you can't see it happening: inside a wall, up in the attic, or under the house at an exterior hose bib. The break itself often doesn't show up until the ice thaws and water starts moving through the pipe again, which is why so many freeze damage calls come in a day or two after the cold snap, not during it.

Getting ready before the cold hits

• Disconnect garden hoses from every outdoor spigot and let the spigot drain
• Cover outside hose bibs with a foam or insulated cover
• Let a slow trickle run from a faucet on any exterior wall during the coldest hours; moving water resists freezing
• Open cabinet doors under sinks that sit on an exterior wall so warm house air can reach the pipes
• Know where your main water shutoff is located before you need it in a hurry
• If you're leaving town during a forecasted freeze, don't turn the heat off, and consider having someone check the house

None of this is complicated, and none of it costs much. It's the kind of thing that's easy to skip until the one year it would have mattered.

Insulating exposed pipe

Pipe running through an uninsulated attic or an exterior wall is exposed to outside temperatures in a way pipe run through conditioned interior walls isn't. Foam pipe insulation sleeves are cheap and take an afternoon to install on any exposed run you can get to, and they're worth doing once, ahead of the season, rather than after the first freeze warning when the shelves at the hardware store are already picked over.

If a pipe bursts anyway

Shut the water off at the main first. That's the single most important thing you can do, and it's the reason knowing where that shutoff is matters more than anything else on this list. Once the water's off, the flooding stops getting worse no matter how bad the break is. After that, turn off electricity to any area with standing water if you can do it safely, and start moving anything you can save away from the water.

Then call us. We run 24-hour emergency service specifically because burst pipes don't wait for business hours, and a Texas freeze tends to produce a run of calls all across North Houston at the same time. We'll get to you and stop the damage from spreading, then figure out what actually needs to be repaired once the water's off and we can see the break clearly.

Dealing with the water damage after the break

Once the leak's stopped, the next problem is time. Standing water in a house this humid starts causing damage fast, wet drywall, swelling baseboards, and if it sits long enough, mold. Get fans and a dehumidifier running on the affected area as soon as it's safe to do so, and don't wait on the plumbing repair to start dealing with what's already wet. We can usually get the repair itself scheduled quickly, but drying the space out is on you to start right away.

What we're actually fixing once the freeze passes

Sometimes it's one split section of pipe in an easy spot. Sometimes it's a fitting inside a wall that has to be opened up to reach. Occasionally a whole exterior hose bib assembly needs to be replaced and rerouted so it's less exposed the next time temperatures drop. We'll tell you honestly which one you're dealing with rather than guessing, and if the same spot has frozen and split before, we'll talk with you about rerouting that line somewhere less exposed instead of just repairing it in place again.

We offer senior citizen discounts, and free estimates on repair work if you want a number before you commit. Call 281-361-7217, day or night, if a pipe bursts or you just want a hand getting the house ready before the next cold snap.