Tips to winterize home

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – Central Indiana is about to gets it’s first real dose of winter weather coming up later this week, with the overnight lows dipping down into the teens.

And before things get really cold, there are some things you can do now to protect your home.

Plumbers suggest the easiest thing you can do is remove your hose from the outside faucet.

“It’s (water) so damaging, you do $5,000 worth of damage in 10 minutes or something and we’ve seen houses destroyed,” said Jack Hope, the owner of Hope Plumbing. “Disconnecting that is really simple, we get hundreds of calls every Spring from where people have forgotten to do this. It stays connected, water gets trapped in there, it freezes and nobody knows until the Spring when they turn their water on and it floods their basement out,” Hope said.

Hope says a major issue is that the local housing stock is older. He says codes were different than they are today. He says older houses are drafty and often times lack insulation.

“They’ve settled and cracked and creeked and you can see light through different places, and that’s where you want to address those areas with insulation,” he said.

Hope says insulation is especially important if pipes are on outside walls. To prevent freezing in a deep freeze he suggests you leave faucets on a steady drip, open cabinet doors that house pipes, close any windows in the basement, and call a plumber to prevent a disaster.

“The amount of work required to prevent this stuff is minimal and what you save can be quite a bit,” he said.

Hope says another trick it to keep a fan blowing in the basement. He says that will help move warmer air around to prevent the pipes from freezing.

For more on Hope Plumbing, click here.