Fire and Ice
Before I start tonight’s post I wanted to add another perspective from events of today. I awoke this morning to another day well below zero and was notified that the downstairs bathroom was only giving us hot water; no cold water was coming out of the shower. This led me to think that there was a frozen pipe and also that one of the pipes was touching one of the hydronic heating pipes. This in turn was making the ‘cold’ water pipe seem to be giving hot water. The cold pipe was robbing the heat from the hot pipe that goes to our baseboard heaters. I knew this was going to be a long day having to repair a busted pipe when I returned home and not something I could deal with right then at six am so my mindset was not negative but also not the start of a ‘happy day’.
The day progressed and I received a call around three in the afternoon that the pipe had thawed and was now leaking water out of the ceiling in the mud room leading from the garage into the stairway into the house. Luckily it was only flooding out the garage but causing the problem of freezing one of the garage doors shut where the water was flowing out the bottom. Again I knew it would be a long night once I returned home getting the sheetrock cut out, locate the burst pipe and then do the repairs. Bummer of a day or so I thought at the time.
I then received another phone call from my boss alerting me that my superintendent’s house was on fire and they were heading that way to see how bad things were and to try to salvage his motorcycle, truck, and RV. If they could also get anything from the house they would bring it to the shop to store and thaw from the fire department ‘ice spray’. At minus 10 below zero water does not stay in liquid form very long. At forty below if you throw a cup of water up in the air it will freeze before it hits the ground.
I knew then my day was not all that bad, only a minor inconvenience to do the repairs. This was another reminder of how we sometimes think we have it so ‘bad’ only to learn someone else we know has something going on in their life that makes our problems seem trivial.
We found out that everyone was ok and out of the house but it was a total loss. Things turned into a not so good day but also lesson learned the hard way.
Never clean your fireplace embers while they are still warm and put them outside close to something that might be flammable, like the house.
It doesn’t make for a happy ending.
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