Near Disaster Averted (we think)

This evening,around 11 o'clock, Jake discovered that the cold water in the upstairs bathroom sink and shower was not funtioning. Hot came through fine, just no cold water. This is the dreaded, tell-tale sign of the dreaded

FROZEN PIPE.

Panic ensued (mine).

There are a number of bizzare things about situation. These include:

1) upstairs toilet (right beside sink) was running just fine with plenty of water filling the tank. Unfortunately, the water filling that tank was HOT water. This, of course, is not normal.

2) all other bathrooms and sinks, even the ones in the basement, were functioning just fine.

3) we don't know exactly where the pipes in the upstairs bathroom come from, but it's pretty clear that they are on an INSIDE wall, not some outside, very exposed and hence cold area.

After calls to my mom and to Jake's dad, we started a few very lame courses of action that were probably more about feeling like we were doing something than actually doing something. We turned on the shower and sink, full force with the hot water, my own logic being that the hot and cold pipes come in side-by-side, thus hot pipes might help warm up the cold ones beside them. I turned up the heat in the house a bit, and also turned up and moved the bathroom space heater to directly hit an outside wall (though we have no idea if there's a pipe anywhere near there). I also pointed a hairdryer at the wall in a few places, and at the pipes under the sink, although the only pipes we could see (the input directly under the sink) were clearly not the problem, since they were quite warm.

After several trips to the basement, during which we were completely unable to find any pipes that appeared to head anywhere in the direction of the upstairs bathroom, we sat on the floor of the bathroom, weighing our options. We were sitting there for a while, when all of a sudden, the cold water starts spraying out of the sink faucet (we had left the faucet on). This was about an hour and a half after the whole fiasco started.

So, don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that things are up and running again. But, I'm VERY surprised at how it happened. I can imagine that if we were heating up pipes and walls actively, the pipe might start suddenly spitting out water. But we were sitting there, doing nothing. Why was it suddenly fixed? I don't get it.

We have the sink running at a drip, and I'll no doubt be getting up several times tonight to obsessively check the situation. And we're going to call a plumber anyway, to get a few things checked out.

By the way, if you were wondering about that whole hot-water-in the toilet, there is apparently a mixing valve in the system, which, under normal circumstances, allows a small amount of hot water into the toilet tank to eliminate condensation on the outside of the tank. However, when the cold water is off, it allows all hot water to fill the tank. This is really not a good thing. Actually, hot hot water in the toilet tank and hence toilet bowl is really gross for reasons I will leave to your own imagination.

For those of you wondering what that mixing valve looks like, Jake took a picture under the upstairs bathroom sink:



So the hot water comes in on the left, the cold on the right; the oval-shaped knobs are the shutoffs for the incoming water. Then water from BOTH hot and cold go down through the lower pipes, the ones with the red shutoffs. They join at that spot all the way on the right, and then go out the wall, and over to the toilet.

All this to keep condensation from forming on the tank. The thing is, typically it takes a while (especially this time of year) to get the hot water running in the upstairs bathroom. So I'm not convinced that it's all that efficient. I just realized, though, that we could turn off that red shutoff for the hot water entirely and see how it goes with the condensation; it doesn't seem like condensation on the tank is a problem in the winter anyway.

So for now, we are cautiously optimistic that we don't have a frozen pipe. Our worry now is, where WAS the pipe frozen? (or was this problem related to something else entirely...is there ANY possibility that there was some other issue??) If it was a frozen spot, how do we go about finding it and fixing the cold air leak? It is a perplexing question. And here I thought we had fixed all the emergencies in January; looks like February may be more of the same! Ack!