"PerryOne" wrote

Bought a 1967 brick rancher two months ago. The termite inspector
yesterday told me yesterday I had a water pipe leaking rather badly.
The plumber came and fixed it but also told me there is no insulation
under the house in the crawlspace. He says there are staples there but

The under floor insulation is very important, as heat always moves to
cold.

Perry there is one possible addition to this that you may not (and many
dont) have thought of. If the water pipes are down there, that leached heat
might be just enough to have kept the pipes from freezing in winter. It is
even possible the insulation was removed to prevent that by previous owner.

I'd suggest calling the plumber in his case to just check (should be a free
call for advice for this sort of thing) if he needs to do some sort of pipe
heating to match the insulation for his area.

My experince is not the same as a crawlspace but comes from a side issue
somewhat related. We have a laundry area with pipes that run along an
exterior wall along the roof with no insulation (has it now after the blow
out). There was a pipe heater strip along it that failed and this may be
related to why the pipes burst, but on futher checking we think that pipe
heater went 'belly up' much longer ago and the real difference was we had
just removed an old commercial size freezer from the garage and put the new
energystar unit in it's place. The savings of electrical was not that big
between the units but some part went bad that was easily fixed for less than
30$ by the soup kitchen that took the old unit, and the new one is more
sized for our needs (old one was a MONSTER BIG thing you could literally fit
a whole cow in, head and all). Anyways, The old unit was actually heating
the garage just enough, the pipes never hit freezing.

Now, we have new pipe heaters, and an electrical heater set for about 5C
back there. I'll be moving that heater to my 'new' (rebuilt) sunroom and
getting a bigger unit before this winter for the garage as that one was not
sized for the space (emergency fix, got biggest we could afford at the
time).

The macabre part is the old huger freezer was less expensive on the
electrical bill than the combination of the electric heater and the new
energystar freezer. Aint that a kicker?