How to protect your pipes and irrigation from an El Paso hard freeze

Most El Paso homeowners do not think about freezing pipes because most El Paso winters do not freeze them. Then a hard freeze rolls in off an Arctic front, drops the overnight low into the low 20s or lower, and by morning there is water coming through a garage ceiling. It happens somewhere in this city every winter. The homes that get hit are almost never the ones that prepared. They are the ones that assumed the desert would stay warm.

The good news is that pipe protection is cheap, fast, and mostly something you can do yourself in an afternoon. Here is the practical version, built for El Paso construction and El Paso weather.

Why El Paso pipes freeze when colder cities' pipes do not

Cities that freeze every winter build for it. Pipes run deep, water heaters sit inside conditioned space, and hose bibs are frost-proof by code. El Paso builds for heat. A lot of local homes have exposed plumbing in unconditioned space: pipes running through an uninsulated garage, along an exterior stucco-and-block wall, or across an open crawl space or attic. Those lines are fine 360 nights a year and vulnerable on the other five.

The single most exposed part on almost every El Paso house is the outdoor hose bib and any pipe on the exterior of the home. A 40-year El Paso plumber put it simply to KFOX14: exposed pipes, especially the ones outside the home, should be wrapped with foam insulation, and thicker insulation protects better. His words were that it is like wearing a jacket. The pipe does not make its own heat, so you are trapping what little warmth is around it and slowing the freeze.

Insulate the exposed pipes and hose bibs

Walk the outside of your house and the inside of the garage and look for any pipe you can see and touch. Those are your risks. Wrap them.

• Hose bibs and exterior faucets. Disconnect and drain every garden hose. A connected hose traps water against the bib and the freeze pushes back into the wall. After the hose is off, cover each bib with a foam faucet cover, which costs a few dollars at any hardware store.
• Exposed pipe in the garage, along exterior walls, in crawl spaces and attics. Wrap it with foam pipe insulation or fiberglass. Thicker is better. Pay special attention to any pipe on an exterior wall or in a space that is not heated.
• The pipe to a garage clothes washer. If your washer sits in an unheated garage, that supply line is a classic El Paso burst point. The Texas Department of Insurance recommends turning off the water to a washer in an unheated garage before a freeze.

This is an hour of work and maybe forty dollars in materials. It is the highest-return thing you will do all winter.

Winterize the irrigation before the first freeze

Your sprinkler and drip system is more fragile than your house plumbing because it lives entirely outside. The most vulnerable part is the backflow preventer, the brass assembly that sticks up out of the ground near the water meter. It has thin internal parts and no soil around it, so it freezes and cracks first.

Do this before the first hard freeze, not during it:

1. Shut off the water supply to the irrigation system at its dedicated valve.
2. Clear the water out of the lines. In El Paso the reliable method is to blow the lines out with compressed air, running each zone until only air comes out of the heads. Do not skip this. Water left in a lateral line freezes, expands, and splits the pipe or a fitting underground where you will not find it until spring.
3. Insulate the backflow preventer. Wrap the exposed brass and any above-ground pipe with insulation, or use an insulated cover. This is the part that fails most often.

If you are not comfortable running a compressor through your zones, a one-time irrigation blowout from a local service is inexpensive and worth it. A cracked backflow assembly is a bigger bill than the blowout, and a split underground lateral is worse.

Do not forget the water heater

Your water heater is often in the garage in El Paso, which means it is in unconditioned space. The tank itself rarely freezes, but the exposed supply and outlet pipes on top of it can, and a tankless unit mounted on an exterior wall is directly at risk.

Wrap the exposed pipes at the top of a tank heater. If you have a tankless unit on an outside wall, confirm it has freeze protection and that it stays powered, because most rely on internal heaters that only work with electricity. During an extended freeze with a power outage, that protection is gone, which is the exact scenario that takes out tankless units here.

What to do when a freeze warning lands

When the forecast calls for a hard freeze overnight, run through this the evening before:

• Find your main water shutoff valve now, before anything bursts. Knowing where it is and that it turns is the difference between a wet spot and a flooded house. If a pipe does let go, you shut this off immediately.
• Open the cabinet doors under kitchen and bathroom sinks, especially on exterior walls, so household heat reaches the pipes.
• Let both the hot and cold faucets drip overnight. Moving water is much harder to freeze, and an open faucet relieves the pressure that actually bursts the pipe.
• Keep the heat on and the thermostat at 55 or higher, even if you are leaving. The heating cost is nothing next to a burst pipe.
• If you leave town, turn off the water at the main shutoff valve and leave the heat running.

None of this is expensive. All of it is faster than dealing with the aftermath.

If a pipe freezes or bursts

If you turn on a faucet during a freeze and only a trickle comes out, you likely have a frozen line. If a pipe has already burst, shut off the water at the main valve right away to stop water from flooding out once the ice thaws.

After a thaw, inspect the pipe before you trust it. Copper stretches to prevent a leak when the water inside freezes, so a section that looks swollen or bulged has already been compromised and should be replaced, not just patched. Cracks, active leaks, rust, or corrosion at the joint after thawing are all signs the pipe needs a real repair. The repair to the pipe is usually the cheap part. The drywall, insulation, flooring, and everything the water touched is where the cost lands, and total damage from a burst pipe can run from $5,000 to $70,000.

A quick word if the damage is already done

If a freeze got ahead of you and you are now looking at water damage, cut into drywall, or a repipe question, the order of operations matters. Getting the dry-out, the plumbing repair, and the reconstruction sequenced correctly is what keeps a bad week from turning into a bad month.

We rebuild freeze and water damage on homes across El Paso and Las Cruces, and we are happy to walk a job with you and give you an honest read on what actually needs to happen, whether you hire us or not. If you want a second opinion before you commit to anyone, reach out through the form on the residential side of the site and we will take a look.