We were without functioning heat in our addition from December 29th until about an hour ago because our pipes froze overnight when our thermostat batteries died and the thermostat stopped working. The addition is over a car port so there is no basement or even a garage underneath it, and the freeze was apparently somewhere under the floor. I spent the first two days trying desperately to find the freeze and melt it, using a hairdryer on all the copper elbow joints and using space heaters to raise the ambient temperature in the room to 87 degrees, to no avail.
We've been heating the area with space heaters since and hoping for the best, and today is the first time the temps have gotten above freezing since 12/29. I'm actually surprised that it thawed today, given the deep freeze this past weekend and the fact that it is only barely above freezing at home now.
So far, so good in terms of leaks; apparently it is mostly PEX tubing, which I am told is much less likely to leak because it expands and contracts better than copper tubing.
The lesson I have learned is to make sure we always have spare AAA batteries--good ones, not the dead spares my wife grabbed from a plastic bag that night. Also, there is apparently something called a circulator that we can have installed in the loop that will detect if starts to get too cold and will start circulating hot water through the piping to prevent it from freezing. Gonna look into that.
