suddenly no water from one faucet
January 26, 2019 7:28 AM Subscribe
The hot water faucet in my bathroom sink is not producing *any* water - not even a trickle. Is the pipe frozen?
There are two sinks side by side in the bathroom, each with a hot and cold faucet. The other three faucets are fine. This has never happened in my experience.
It has been cold where I live, from the teens to the twenties F. It's very warm inside the house. But is the pipe frozen on that one side and if so what can we do immediately with zero handyperson experience in our household?
Do I need to call an after hours (weekend = $$) plumber or can this wait? Is there anything I can do to prevent a burst pipe? this is an upstairs bathroom with the pipes under the sink in a cabinet.
There are two sinks side by side in the bathroom, each with a hot and cold faucet. The other three faucets are fine. This has never happened in my experience.
It has been cold where I live, from the teens to the twenties F. It's very warm inside the house. But is the pipe frozen on that one side and if so what can we do immediately with zero handyperson experience in our household?
Do I need to call an after hours (weekend = $$) plumber or can this wait? Is there anything I can do to prevent a burst pipe? this is an upstairs bathroom with the pipes under the sink in a cabinet.
I can't imagine how just one pipe would be frozen, especially the hot water one. My guess is that the valve for the line to that faucet is broken. There should be a valve under the sink. Unfortunately, to replace it, you'll need to turn off the water supply to your house (there's usually a main valve in the basement). If the valve appears to be old, I would be hesitant to do anything to it if you're not good with that stuff. I was replying a sink in my sister's house and that valve was very old and corroded and broke when I tried to turn it off. Water everywhere! Luckily we could quickly turn off the main water valve in the basement.
So, I say live without the hot water in that one sink until the weekend is over.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:35 AM on January 26, 2019
So, I say live without the hot water in that one sink until the weekend is over.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:35 AM on January 26, 2019
OK first off, do you have kids? When you look at the pipes under the sink, do they have ball valves on them? (They should.) Is the handle on the hot water pipe's ball valve pointing perpendicular to the pipe, rather than parallel with it? If so, there's your problem and one of your darling little scamps has been playing with the valves under the sink. Now…
It's unlikely that it's frozen, especially if you've been through periods of similar or greater cold and it's been fine then. If you want to play detective, you could try to trace that pipe through the house and back to its trunk, to see if maybe somebody committed a crime against plumbing and ran that one pipe through an uninsulated space for some ungodly reason. Stranger things have happened. If indeed it is frozen, you could try to thaw it by putting a space heater in that area and warming it back up.
Much more likely though is that there's some kind of mechanical blockage, most likely right at the tap. I'd bet money that something in the valve body for the actual handle that turns the water on and off has broken. What you could do in that case is turn off that pipe using the ball valve that is hopefully there under the sink. Then, if you're handy, you can remove the tap, check to see whether the hot water handle is actually doing anything when you turn it, and if necessary go on down to the hardware store and replace it yourself. If you want a little guidance as far as how to do this properly, there should be a wealth of Youtube videos out there that can walk you through it. Generally speaking, it is not a particularly difficult task and you should not have to pay a plumber $150 an hour to do it for you.
That's only a guess, but that's where I'd start. There are any number of things that could be blocking the pipe, and if it's not just a busted tap then yeah it's probably plumber time.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2019
It's unlikely that it's frozen, especially if you've been through periods of similar or greater cold and it's been fine then. If you want to play detective, you could try to trace that pipe through the house and back to its trunk, to see if maybe somebody committed a crime against plumbing and ran that one pipe through an uninsulated space for some ungodly reason. Stranger things have happened. If indeed it is frozen, you could try to thaw it by putting a space heater in that area and warming it back up.
Much more likely though is that there's some kind of mechanical blockage, most likely right at the tap. I'd bet money that something in the valve body for the actual handle that turns the water on and off has broken. What you could do in that case is turn off that pipe using the ball valve that is hopefully there under the sink. Then, if you're handy, you can remove the tap, check to see whether the hot water handle is actually doing anything when you turn it, and if necessary go on down to the hardware store and replace it yourself. If you want a little guidance as far as how to do this properly, there should be a wealth of Youtube videos out there that can walk you through it. Generally speaking, it is not a particularly difficult task and you should not have to pay a plumber $150 an hour to do it for you.
That's only a guess, but that's where I'd start. There are any number of things that could be blocking the pipe, and if it's not just a busted tap then yeah it's probably plumber time.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2019
For whatever it's worth, I *have* had just the hot water pipe freeze, especially if it's tacked to the wall the way that they sometimes are--one house in particular had hot water lines run against exterior walls, and the hot tap froze up several times.
I'd open the cabinet doors, and if you have a space heater, run a space heater in the bathroom for a while and see if that makes any change. If the pipe is just frozen and hasn't burst, all you have to do is thaw it out. If an hour of space heater gets a trickle of water going, you're probably fine, at least in my experience.
posted by mishafletch at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'd open the cabinet doors, and if you have a space heater, run a space heater in the bathroom for a while and see if that makes any change. If the pipe is just frozen and hasn't burst, all you have to do is thaw it out. If an hour of space heater gets a trickle of water going, you're probably fine, at least in my experience.
posted by mishafletch at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2019 [2 favorites]
If it's frozen, it's probably not frozen inside the cabinet. More likely candidates would be the basement, the eaves (if the pipe runs through any eaves), or buried somewhere in an exterior wall that never got properly insulated. Hot water pipes sure can freeze though, the water in them stops being hot shortly after you turn off the tap that they serve. This is more and more the case the farther away you get from the hot water heater. But you'd think that if it's a frozen pipe, and the freeze was in the vanity cabinet, both A) the whole bathroom would be seriously cold and B) both pipes would be frozen, not just the hot one.
By the way if does turn out to be a frozen pipe, and you find it, and it has burst, go ahead and shut the water to your house off at the main and drain the house by opening whatever the lowest tap is that you can access and just leaving it open. And put a big bucket under the burst spot. This is in case it should melt before you can get a plumber out to repair it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:11 AM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]
By the way if does turn out to be a frozen pipe, and you find it, and it has burst, go ahead and shut the water to your house off at the main and drain the house by opening whatever the lowest tap is that you can access and just leaving it open. And put a big bucket under the burst spot. This is in case it should melt before you can get a plumber out to repair it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:11 AM on January 26, 2019 [1 favorite]
This has happened to me once. The hot water pipe tool a slightly different path up to my bathroom and that made all the difference. The culprit was that I had left the garage door open and this bathroom was above the garage and I guess the pipes were close to the floor. Who knew? In any case, to test the "frozen pipes" theory, try to trace the pipes back as far as you can. Crank the heat. Open the cabinets. If it's not bitterly cold there, a little bit of heat should warm everything right up and bursting pipes are unlikely in this scenario but make sure you know where the shutoff valve is just in case.
posted by jessamyn at 8:16 AM on January 26, 2019
posted by jessamyn at 8:16 AM on January 26, 2019
Like Jessamym, I had a sort of "perfect storm" that caused my kitchen hot water pipe to freeze. It was very cold out and there was no snow outside insulating the basement. Yes, snow can act as an insulator. The pipes under the sink were inside an insulated and heated room but I traced the pipe down to the unheated basement and found a bend (from vertical to horizontal) right at a spot where the pipe was against the wood sill, with no insulation anywhere around it. The pipe was very cold to the touch so I knew it was frozen at that spot.
I turned the tap on at the sink and used a hair dryer to thaw the pipe. It only took a couple of minutes before the water was flowing.
Once thawed, I managed to get some insulation between the sill and the pipe and it hasn't frozen again.
It was frozen for a few hours but luckily I didn't have a burst. All my pipes (drain pipes and pressured) are PVC, which I assume has a bit more leeway than copper.
posted by bondcliff at 8:25 AM on January 26, 2019
I turned the tap on at the sink and used a hair dryer to thaw the pipe. It only took a couple of minutes before the water was flowing.
Once thawed, I managed to get some insulation between the sill and the pipe and it hasn't frozen again.
It was frozen for a few hours but luckily I didn't have a burst. All my pipes (drain pipes and pressured) are PVC, which I assume has a bit more leeway than copper.
posted by bondcliff at 8:25 AM on January 26, 2019
We had the hot water pipe in one bathroom freeze earlier this week - all the other pipes, including the cold water to that bathroom, were fine. It was much colder though where you are though, around -10 F. It’s an old house so I wouldn’t be surprised if the pipes weren’t properly insulated (and they definitely go through an exterior wall)
We were able to fix it by turning up the heat inside, opening the cabinet doors under the sink, and blasting space heaters at the walls roughly where the pipes were. We didn’t figure out exactly where the pipe froze, but it’s working normally again and no water is coming out of the walls so it seems to be fixed.
posted by insectosaurus at 9:29 AM on January 26, 2019
We were able to fix it by turning up the heat inside, opening the cabinet doors under the sink, and blasting space heaters at the walls roughly where the pipes were. We didn’t figure out exactly where the pipe froze, but it’s working normally again and no water is coming out of the walls so it seems to be fixed.
posted by insectosaurus at 9:29 AM on January 26, 2019
To save piping and construction labor, the hot water connections of the two side by side sinks probably come from a T connector to a single hot water line fairly close to both.
I think anticipation's diagnosis of a mechanical blockage is most likely to be correct, and you might be able to test it by opening the tap that doesn't work completely, then running the hot water on the other tap full blast.
That will cause the Bernoulli effect to exert suction at the point of blockage of the tap, and that might dislodge the block a little bit and allow a trickle to come through after you turn off the water to the tap that works. Then you'd know it was a mechanical problem, though if no trickle emerges, it still might be a mechanical block.
posted by jamjam at 11:45 AM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]
I think anticipation's diagnosis of a mechanical blockage is most likely to be correct, and you might be able to test it by opening the tap that doesn't work completely, then running the hot water on the other tap full blast.
That will cause the Bernoulli effect to exert suction at the point of blockage of the tap, and that might dislodge the block a little bit and allow a trickle to come through after you turn off the water to the tap that works. Then you'd know it was a mechanical problem, though if no trickle emerges, it still might be a mechanical block.
posted by jamjam at 11:45 AM on January 26, 2019 [3 favorites]
Blow dryer on whatever pipe you can track will thaw pipes, worth a try. And, yes, open any doors to let heat in. I have had a hearing pipe freeze in very cold weather, they don't always burst, thankfully.
posted by theora55 at 1:13 PM on January 26, 2019
posted by theora55 at 1:13 PM on January 26, 2019
If it's frozen, it's probably not frozen inside the cabinet. More likely candidates would be t...
Except that the dry HW faucet and the one in the sink next to it are certainly fed by the same supply pipe. If that pipe was frozen anywhere, neither hot faucet would work. The problem is certainly in the cabinet.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:02 AM on January 27, 2019
Except that the dry HW faucet and the one in the sink next to it are certainly fed by the same supply pipe. If that pipe was frozen anywhere, neither hot faucet would work. The problem is certainly in the cabinet.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:02 AM on January 27, 2019
So in the UK we tend to have separate hot/cold water pipes for historical reasons. But also in London we have extremely limescale-heavy water, and the boiler makes this phenomenon even more pronounced. So as a result I've had to try and descale or replace the cartridge on our kitchen sing a few times to get around the lack of hot water, because that side of it got completely scaled up.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:53 PM on January 27, 2019
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:53 PM on January 27, 2019
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posted by lazuli at 7:33 AM on January 26, 2019