Last week, just before Christmas, another frigid Arctic blast came down from Canada (some say it started in Siberia) and thousands of houses in Texas and Oklahoma found the water pipes frozen in the morning.
Those of us who have lived for years in colder climes left the faucets dribbling hot water and flushed the toilet several times in the night to keep the water moving fast enough to stay liquid all night long.
For at least fifty years, ever since I bought my first mobile home, I have wondered:
Why do house designers put water pipes in an outer wall?
Why do they put toilets and sinks on an outer wall?
Why is the water service connection next to the outer wall?
One of the joys of moving down here to the south is never having to crawl on my belly under the house with a torch or hair dryer trying to heat up the pipes and get the water flowing again.
The VRBO house we rented for the family Christmas gathering in Denison, Texas, has the water supply to the “mother-in-law suite”, (a separate room in the backyard) raise out of the ground outside the concrete footing and go through the wall about a foot above the ground. Needless to say, both hot and cold froze up one morning, even with the water dribbling all night.
If it were my house, I would box those pipes in with insulation between them and the outside air.
I occurs to me that the problem was solved back when Disneyland, California, opened about 1955 or so. They featured a “House of the Future” as a walkthrough exhibit. It wasn’t flashy or exciting enough so it got demolished ten years later, but the principles were right.
The central core of the house was a square pillar of concrete with all water, drain and utility connections on the inside walls. The four wings of the house with outer wall had no water or drains at all. It would have made a winter proof home in Montana or Alaska, but there it was in California.
I sometimes visualize a new mobile home using the same principles, with the bathrooms and kitchen in the center, water and drains contained in a central concrete cellar/storm shelter, and with living room and bedrooms on each end. I don’t think it would add much cost at all. And never again would the owner have to spend Christmas Eve morning fixing the pipes underneath the house.
What are they teaching house designers in college, anyway? Could we send them out some bitterly cold morning to thaw people’s pipes?
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