How to protect your home, pipes during cold snap

Here are some things you can do to protect your home and pipes as temperatures plummet.

Temperatures have dropped yet again across northern Ontario and it’s no doubt making some homeowners slightly nervous.

Whether it’s your pipes or even your heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system, there are things you can be doing to make sure you don’t incur any problems during the deep freeze of winter.

“So the cold has definitely come upon us and there are some warnings the general public should be aware by this point,” said Anthony Davis, president of Greater Sudbury Plumbing and Heating.

“When it goes way below freezing, your home definitely takes a beating, so it’s a good idea to be prepared.”

Davis said he began clearing his schedule a week ago in hopes of having staff available to deal with the influx of calls he’ll likely be facing from people without heat or those who find their pipes frozen.

“If you see up ahead it’s going to get very, very cold, a couple of things you should definitely prepare for is have some electric heaters in your home,” he said.

“Your furnace, your boiler, whatever your main source of heat is, you don’t know if it might fail so at that time, have some back-up heaters you can plug in around your home to keep your house above temp to avoid any frozen, split or damaged waterlines throughout your house.”

Davis said his call line will typically quadruple when the temperature dips below -20C.

• Check the current weather forecast for your area

“Unfortunately, we’re not able to service every customer, but we try our best and we try to mitigate the level of emergency,” he said.

“So some calls will be ‘I have no water to my kitchen sink.’ If that’s the biggest call of the day, we’ll make an effort to get there, but most of the time, it’s ‘I have no water to my whole house or I have waterfall in my basement because the waterline split and froze.’”

The same goes for an HVAC system.

His best advice, ensure it’s serviced at least once a year by getting ahead of it in the spring or fall and to make sure if you have back-up heat.

“My key advice would be getting back-up heaters in your home,” Davis said.

“And also take a look at the main water valve in your home and make sure it works because if you have a frozen line or a split or a flood, that’s the one place you want to go to kill the water because it goes from a 911 to ‘oh, you can wait until we get there.’”