damn its cold

We had an ice storm a couple of weeks back and man shit was retarded. My driveway was 7" solid ice. I mean like skating rink type shit. No making snow balls or anything. Retarded. Warmed my car up for 30 minutes did nothing at all, not to mention all the doors had frozen shut and was a bitch to get in. Had to end up using driveway icemelt and a scrapper to get that crap off. It's like what the hell? This is Texas! Don't think I've ever seen it like that in the Dallas area.

 

so heres how stupid I am, lol....


I say in the last post that my my pipes froze and hey, they let loose, as in I thought they thawed out and re-opened cuz I had a heater and the faucets open in the tub....WELL....what I thought (as I typed) was the pipe moving free was a pipe that had BURST above the cold water shutoff and was blowing about 20gallons of water into my newly finished basement and all over my upstairs bathroom tile floor......so I shutoff the valve, go downstairs and get some more half inch copper pipe, get my map gas and solder etc etc.....cut it out n' replace it, boom..do a test run...back in the game right?! WRONG!!!!!!! I figure out that not only was the cold frozeup but right above the shower mixer point (where the cold n hot come together) where the neck goes up to feed the showerhead, that motherfucker burst next :rofl6:


Long story short...ripped apart the closet in the bathroom and replaced the entire shower guts from right above the shutoff valves, then went n got new drywall, threw it up, used some 20min mud, sanded it back down, painted it her white, rehung the shelves and now im here....still smelly, not showered, still greasy and stankin like reefer!


All in all, a great day of dick kicks:roffl:

 

I'm not positive about gator or shark bite fittings. I didn't actually build the house with my hands, just had a builder do it and had them do what I wanted. But I think the PEX saved my ass. None of the copper bursted. I was at 0*F with a high of 11* from a drop overnight from the day temps in the 60s with windchills subzero. It was in the 50s still when I left work at night and had no clue what was coming. So I did nothing. I didn't even put my foam insulators on the faucets and apparently at the same time that night we had 30-45mph winds throughout the subfreezing night. I honestly think that PEX saved me. That way the water had somewhere to go and as it expanded it was able to also. IDK either way none of the freeze breaks on the exterior faucets broke and nothing else ruptured. Got everything going again and with everything off at the meter the flow indicator is at a stand still.

 

I don't know where you live but if anywhere that normally gets a good amount of cold weather that's a testament in it's own. After all as odd as it seems your hot water lines will freeze faster than cold due to the movement and frequency of collisions between molecules.


Example. Supercooled water in a bottle. Take a bottle of water or a beer. throw it in the freezer get it below freezing temp but the liquid still remains. Add a shock to it.... Bam a couple of molecules create a seed crystal and then sets off a chain reaction. With hot water lines and fast temperature drops the hot will freeze faster due to the temperature dropping and the hot water molecules vibrating more than cold water so the collisions are more likely to create the seed crystal than then expands outward as others come in contact.


Check it. Water does it even faster.


[YOUTUBE]CzEC7WWeNyA[/YOUTUBE]


Remember beer contains alcohol which has a much lower actual freeze point. So what happens with pipes is the pipe gets soo cold itself with stagnant water that it actually is the driving force for the ice crystals on the surface of the metal pipe. Then as the excited water molecules continue to collide due to their current energy state it causes them to join the crystal lattice and produce a highly exothermic environment. Keeping in mind that exothermic is releasing heat while endothermic absorbing. The act of making ice is exothermic as funny as it sounds. However, think of how ice melts. You apply heat that is then absorbed by the high specific heat water that gradually melts. :F-A-Q: LMFAOasssit:

 

Yup in the old days farmers put pans of water in the root cellars, which gave off just enough heat as they would freeze to protect everything else down there. I read about that in books about farming in the 1800's.


And the supercooled water quick-freeze thing is cool too. I never really understood why warm water pipes frooze faster and worse than cold. Thanks asssit:

 

Got any links for anything to read up on that? I would be interested to check it out.


Also, yeah I was dumbfounded at first about the hot to cold pipes freezing at different rates until I sat down smoked a bowl and day dreamed a bit then did more searching to confirm or refute my ideas from my own learning/teaching/experience. LOL


For a slightly different and unrelated example. Take cold air versus hot air. You will never see a cold air balloon unless it uses a less dense gas other than what's in the atmosphere like helium. Hot air moves around more rapidly so less air can fill a certain space(also hence the vent at the top of the hot air balloon). So cold air is more dense than warm or hot, so it takes a much larger volume to occupy. Heat it and it expands. In a hot air balloon the heating gradually expels some of that volume of gas so that it is still enough to occupy the space, yet less in abundance which means less in overall weight which also correlates to density thus giving it lift. So there are less while at the same time more highly active molecules filling the balloon.


Heat means more inter-molecular activity and/or inefficiency, hence radiators we still can't figure out how to put all the power into motion as opposed to heat. In time we will have something along the lines of combustion induction where excess heat and wasted energy isn't a too step process where one creates the main power and exerts a loss while another uses that to contribute to another system to amplify it to some extent. Thought even still that could be further refined.

 

Ive used them for repairs on my rental properties....work great, cheap as hell ($5-10), never had an issue, some are about 5-6years old now


shower was only down for about 6hours all told....no biggie, didn't have time to take a shower downstairs

 

Skunky I read about the root cellar in a book called Farmer Boy written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.


Here's a reference to this I googled up. Not home ATM so can't thumb thru book to give you a cite.


"The toughest places to identify for root cellars in the home are ones that require cool temperatures, close to the freezing point of 32 degrees. You don't want your vegetables to freeze if the temperature gets really cold outside.


But science helps out here. Because they are not pure water, vegetables freeze at temperatures lower than 32 degrees. So the way to keep the vegetables safe is to put a pan of water in the root cellar, which because of some scientific principle that I don't really understand will keep the air at 32 degrees for quite a while as the water freezes.


What this means to me is that I am going to convert our bulkhead to a cold-temperature root cellar. I already have the bulkhead insulated and wooden doors in addition to the metal bulkhead, because I wanted to keep the cellar warm while I did projects in the basement. But when I tried the bulkhead in the past, some vegetables froze. I didn't know I needed a pan of water in there."

 

I just got off the phone with a friend living in New York near the Canadian Border.


He said that since early this morning the snow has been coming down, it is nearly waist high and is still falling. The temperature is dropping way below zero and the North wind is increasing to near gale force. His wife has done nothing but look through the kitchen window and just stare.


He says that if it gets much worse, he may have to let her in.


:rofl6:

 

Awesome thanks FF I got something to look more into now. And man the wife thing is effin hilarious. LMAO