That should be fine. I don't think it happens too often, especially in
your case.

--
Joseph E. Meehan

26 + 6 = 1 It's Irish Math


"Jeff Wisnia" wrote in message
...


Joseph Meehan wrote:
I was thinking more of the problem that may occur if someone
accidentally drains the hot water heater while the water is off.


That'd be hard to do in my house, the hot water heater is in the
basement, and with the main shut off there's no way it could be drained
through normal use of any faucet or appliance. It'd be unlikely that
anyone with enough knowledge and desire to find the heater and open its
drain valve wouldn't know to throw the breaker before draining it.

I was just thinking about what I should do to eliminate the kind of
horrific water damage that our next door neighbor suffered if our house
did lose its heat while we were away and a pipe froze and cracked.

Here's what I saw when I looked out our side windows last year. Dirty
brown frozen ribbons of ice coming down one of the neighbor's garage
doors, from the cracked pipes above.

http://home.comcast.net/~jwisnia18/jeff/freeze.jpg

If I thought there was a high probability of that happening I'd probably
take the trouble go through the full freeze prevention steps of draining
everything, antifreezing the toilets, etc. We heat with two separate
heat pump systems, so it'd probably take losing electric power to the
house for an extended period before things got cold enough to freeze up.

Jeff