Texas has seen no help from fema or red cross. Not one fucking ounce of help. We are Freezing, We have No Water, No Power, No Internet. Grocery Stores are empty, cant find anything.
Now This Story Comes Out On Our Local Fake News.... https://abc13.com/weather/fema-sending-60-generators-to-texas-amid-power-outages-/10349070/... But if you read story it seems like they are more worried about vaccine spots. This is now going on 5 days and they are talking of sending food and water and supplies and Generators... Wtf where the hell has all this shit been... Still Have Not Seen Anything.
I mean most of it is just like "use antifreeze in the car rather than plain hose water" (you should anyways because it's got corrosion inhibitors and shit) and "put that split foam tube around pipes in the crawlspace". Not like it's a lot of money or even effort.
Maybe now they can justify spending a weekend and a couple hundred bucks doing it!
I don't know a single person who uses water instead of antifreeze... I have insulated pipes in the attic that burts. Not much you can do when indoor temperature gets to the teens for days straight. A few hundred bucks wasn't going to prevent this. Pex pipes would run me about $15000. Kinda gets hard to justify that when I'm over 30 years old and this is the longest cold snap I've ever seen in my side of town ever. Yes we've had hard freezes before but not this cold for this long. I'm estimating my damage to around $10000. It's hard justifying spending thousands of dollars for something I might never see again for another 30 years.
Heat tape and a genset is a lot cheaper than redoing doing all the plumbing, and it sounds like you're gonna have to do some reno work anyways.
Heat tape only exists to keep the temp above freezing so it's pretty low watt and you can run quite a bit off a small 1.5kW genset.
I'll keep that in mind, thank you for the recommendation. I'm still evaluating options
No prob, fairly common solution here in Colorado for pipes running thru poorly-insulated spaces.