When Frozen Pipes Burst in an Asheville Home

What Christmas 2022 Showed

An independent review of the water outage over Christmas 2022 described the coldest weather to hit the city since January 2014. The system recorded 27 water main breaks, demand surged as people let faucets run, and on-premise leaks and breaks from the cold added to it. Thousands of customers in the south and west of the system lost service. Frozen pipes inside homes were part of the same story.

Where Pipes Freeze

• crawl spaces with open vents or missing insulation
• plumbing inside outside walls, kitchen sink lines most of all
• pipes in unheated garages, basements and attics
• outdoor spigots that weren't shut off and drained

Asheville has a lot of older housing. Nearly one in five homes predates 1940, according to the Census Bureau, and older houses often have plumbing in spaces that were never meant to be heated.

If a Pipe Freezes or Splits

1. Shut off the main water valve before thawing anything.
2. Open the faucet on the frozen line.
3. Warm the pipe gently with a hair dryer or space heater kept at a safe distance. Keep torches and open flames away from it.
4. If water service went out, keep the main closed until it returns and you've checked for splits.

How We Dry It Out

We extract standing water, then use meters and a thermal camera to trace where it went in walls, floors and the crawl space. Soaked insulation is pulled. Drywall is removed only where readings say it won't dry in place. Dehumidifiers and air movers run until the readings match dry areas, and then we rebuild.

Wind and ice can bring down limbs during the same cold spells; read about storm damage in Asheville. Everything else we do is on the Asheville home page.