Frozen Basement

Monday I crawled out of bed and immediately knew something was wrong. The temp in the basement seemed to be a wee bit on the cold side. Either I was becoming wimpish or sick, or there was something amiss with the heater.

I checked the thermostat - which told me the temp was down to 64 degrees (it is kept at 68). After taking care of the animals, checking my email, posting a short blurb on the Iditarod, and taking my shower, the temp was down to 63.

The heater seemed to be working fine - I had plenty of hot water. I couldn't tell about the upstairs heat, since it was still warm from the woodstove. however, when I looked at the heater zoning, something was amiss; the hot water and upstairs heat zones were green and the downstairs heat zone was red. Red means that that zone is calling for heat - but no water was circulating thru the pipes.

Since the heating system is less than a year old, the logical assumpsion was frozen pipes. We had experienced soem warm weather, melting the insulating snow at the front corner of the house. Although the temps outside weren't too cold (lower teens or upper singles), we had had mighty winds over the weekend, and the only other time we have had frozen pipes were under the same conditions.

We set up a small ceramic heater around the area we thout was frozen, and headed off to work. I stayed at work only a couple of hours, to get the most urgent stuff done, then grabbed a handfull (and zip drive full) of work, and came home. I didn't want to leave the heater going without supervision too long.

Before WS went to work, he dug out another area heater and left it out for me. I moved the spare desk out of the corner and got the second heater working on the wall area. While that was doing its thing, I sat at the main desk, working on the stuff I had brought home. After a couple of hours, and a phone call from WS, we decided maybe it was the pipe under the stairs that was frozen, so I moved one heater over there. I also moved the other heater to the other corner of the room.

Not until much, much later in the day, did we figure out that the circulator for the downstairs zone had died. WS was able to get ahold of the guy who installed it and he came over that night and replaced the faulty circulator.

All's well that ends well; we got the heater fixed and I got some work done that I had dispaired of ever getting done (I needed several uninterupted hours).