Ironic that after 4 days of trying to get antifreeze for the drains when I go away for a while, at midnight it dawns on me that I never drained the pipe to the outdoor spigot, and I never put a foam cover on it either. And there have been whole nights down to 13^F, much colder than usual for B'more.
What if it thaws while I'm out of town?
Go to the basement, climb the ladder, and feel the pipe, and the part I can reach isn't even cold. Good! What did I do with my cheap ir thermometer? No time to look for that.
Turn the valve off, open the bleeder, it dribbles out and then sprays out. Darn, the valve did get hard to turn, but wasn't entirely closed so I don't know if the water that came out was from the part beyond the valve or before the valve. But it doesn't really matter because I'm sure the pipe is not frozen now. The question is, did it freeze and crack on the cold nights.
Close the valve the rest of the way, and I'll worry about it when I get back home. (In the sprilng, I'll have to open the valve a little and look for leaks, and hope if there is one I see it rather quickly.) With the heat on, the basement probably never gets below say 66 and the pipe is in the ceiling and even though its cooled by being connected to the outside, it's 32 out now and the pipe was maybe 55^, so if the temp outside was down another 18 degrees, to 14, maybe inside it would go down at most another 10, to 45.
But that's the part I can reach. It's another 4 inches to the cinder block plus the depth of the cinder block and the brick facing. That's about 16 inches and that's where it would be the coldest.
The previous owner was cold all the time and he stuffed insulation in there, but come to think of it, that keeps the basement a tiny bit warmer and the pipe a little colder!! Maybe I should take that out, in case I forget to drain the pipe some future year.
?????
If I didn't break the pipe this time, maybe I shouldn't waste my time draining it every year. It almost never gets below 14 iirc.
Well the average low downtown in Jan. is 30 and it's a little colder here because of some elevation, 450 feet (but I don't know how high downtown is.) but the record low is -4. Average low at the airport is
25 and record low is -7.