Frozen Pipes near you

The loft is the classic. Britain's traditional plumbing arrangement puts a cold water storage cistern and its distribution pipework in the roof space, and modern loft insulation makes that space colder, not warmer, by keeping the house's heat below it. The Water Fittings Regulations require a storage cistern to be fitted with thermal insulation to minimize freezing or undue warming, and also with an overflow pipe with a suitable means of warning of an impending overflow and a cover positioned to exclude light and insects — all three matter after a freeze, because a cistern that overflows unnoticed does more damage than the frozen pipe did.

The second is anywhere the house stops being heated: an integral garage, an unheated utility, a porch, a void under a suspended timber floor, a boiler condensate pipe run out through an external wall, and the outside tap that nobody isolated in October. The regulations are drafted to cover this — every water fitting must be so constructed and installed as to inhibit damage by freezing — but a great deal of existing British plumbing predates any serious attention to it.

The third is the empty property. Holiday lets, second homes, houses on the market and flats between tenancies freeze because nobody is there to notice that the heating has failed or that a window has been left open. In a house that is occupied and warm, a hard frost is an inconvenience; in one that is empty and unheated for a fortnight, it is a ceiling on the floor.

Turn the water off at the stop tap first, and open the tap the frozen pipe serves so that meltwater has somewhere to go and pressure cannot build behind the ice. Then warm the pipe gently and from the tap end back towards the freeze, using hot water bottles, warm towels or a hairdryer well away from any standing water. Gentle and slow is not a stylistic preference: rapid heating expands the trapped water in a pipe that may already be split and turns a frozen pipe into a burst one while you are standing over it.

Never apply a naked flame, a blowlamp or a heat gun to domestic plumbing. Besides the obvious fire risk in a loft full of insulation and old timber, it can soften solder joints, damage plastic pipe and fittings, and destroy the insulation and cabling around it. If the frozen section is buried, inaccessible, or you cannot identify where the blockage is, that is the point to stop and call a plumber rather than to improvise.

Watch the pipe as it thaws. If water starts to escape, close the stop tap again and get a plumber out. And once water is flowing, check the whole run and the ceilings below it over the next day, because splits caused by ice frequently only announce themselves once the ice has gone.

A single clean split in an accessible length of copper is a straightforward repair, and cutting out the damaged section and making two joints is usually the right call. It stops being the right call when the same run has frozen before, when the pipe is old and thin-walled, or when the split is one of several — ice does not always burst a pipe in only one place, and finding the second failure a week later, behind a reinstated ceiling, is an expensive way to save an hour.

Where a run keeps freezing, the repair is not really a plumbing repair at all: it is a rerouting or an insulation problem. Moving pipework out of an unheated void and into the warm envelope of the house, or lagging it properly and sealing the draught that was chilling it, fixes the cause. The Water Fittings Regulations expect fittings to be installed so as to inhibit damage by freezing, and repeated freezing is evidence that the installation does not.

Old lead supply pipework is a separate conversation. If a freeze has damaged a lead service or supply pipe, replacing it in modern material rather than repairing it is generally worth discussing with your water company, some of which run schemes relating to lead pipe replacement. Ask them directly what they offer in your area rather than assuming.

The split is not where most people assume. The Consumer Council for Water sets out that your water company is responsible for the pipes connecting the water main up to the point where it crosses your property boundary, for the external stop tap usually located in the public footpath, and for the water meter if there is one. The homeowner is responsible for maintaining any water pipes located on private property up to the boundary of the road where the company's water main is laid, and for internal pipes and fittings.

Where a pipe is shared between more than one property, CCW's position is that it becomes the joint responsibility of all the property owners connected to it — which is the situation in a great many Victorian terraces and converted houses, and which needs sorting out between neighbours before, not after, a burst.

That split matters when you are deciding who to call and who pays. A burst on your supply pipe under your garden is yours; a burst in the street is the water company's. Most companies will help locate a leak on a supply pipe even though the repair is the owner's, and metered customers may be able to get an allowance for water lost through an underground leak that is repaired promptly — ask your company what their leak allowance policy is rather than assuming. Then check your buildings insurance for escape of water cover, and for trace and access, which is the part that pays to find and get at the leak rather than merely to mend it. When you need someone quickly, LokalMatch is the introduction and no more: write down what has happened and your postcode once, and plumbers covering your area come back to you, having paid LokalMatch for the request. LokalMatch carries out no repairs, sets nobody's call-out charge, and does not vet, rank or recommend the firms that respond, so checking a plumber's WaterSafe or equivalent approval before they start is still your call.