Pipes are frozen

Quilt over the window

2/2/11 Wednesday
Six degrees this morning. It’s about 45 degrees in the kitchen and the front of the house. Kept a fire going all night, getting up a couple of times to put more wood on it and make sure Buddy, outside, was covered on his electric blanket. We hung a quilt over the bedroom window, like we had done when we first moved in this old house and there was no heat. Despite that, the wood stove, and an electric space heater, along with a blanket hung over the bedroom entrance, it’s still cold. I’m dressed with two pair of thick winter socks, t shirt, flannel shirt, and a quilted flannel on top of that, and am still cold. Rascal and Trixie are both on the bed with me. They went outside but quickly decided they had no interest in their normal morning romp and stayed near the door.

Evidently we have frozen pipes somewhere. Turned the water on and noticed it didn’t have a lot of pressure and that dwindled down to no water at all. Odds are this means the pipes are frozen at the well, a half mile away. This is so not going to be fun. The high today is only supposed to reach 18 degrees, and then it plunges back down to the single digits. Back at the well there is no receptacle to plug anything in so that limits my options for unfreezing pipes. Perhaps I can directly wire something to the box. I really don’t know much about electricity but can give it a try. We’ve got to do something for without water we don’t have a toilet that works, unless we use the bottled water.

I’ll have to cut some more wood today so we can keep trying to stay warm. So it’s going to be a busy day no matter what. Wish me luck and pray I can figure out the frozen pipes.
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I’ve got the truck warming up. Found an old vacuum hose in the garage that I’m thinking I can connect to the truck exhaust and thus pump hot air to pipes at the well. It’s a plastic hose so don’t know if it will melt or not but it’s worth a try. It’s something I’d picked up at the landfill so won’t hurt me to lose it. I’d rather it worked. I dug out some old insulated coveralls the old man was throwing away. They are pretty ragged but in this weather looks aren’t important, protection is. Even going out to start the truck and look for ideas to use on the as yet unlocated frozen pipes put a chill to my bones. I put my feet up on the wood burner to warm the boots up some as my toes have been numb with cold since we woke up this morning.
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Praise the Lord, we have water. The piping exhaust to the pipes around the well idea worked better than I thought. Odds are the culprit was the area where the pressure switch that turns the well on and off, for when I aimed the plastic tube there and left it sit the well started working again. I’ll go back and put more insulation around it, after I warm up some. We will leave our water running here at the house to help insure it doesn’t freeze up again. Doesn’t appear that there are any cracked pipes but I’ll look more closely when I return to add insulation. Need to wait till I can feel my toes again first.