Frozen Pipes and No Water? No Problem!

As the country was plunged into a deep freeze over the week of Christmas, it created problems for many people from cancelled flights, to frozen pipes as far south even as Austin, Texas!  Our family was no exception.  We ended up with frozen (and eventually burst) pipes and therefore no water for a period of time.  So, jump into this post and take a look at what we learned from our (almost week long) stint without running water over CHRISTMAS!

So let me set the scene for you just a bit.  Let’s talk about foods.  Okay, our Christmas feast doesn’t look like the typical American feast.  We don’t eat turkey or ham and mashed potatoes or stuffing, corn casserole or pumpkin bread.  About five years ago, we started doing finger foods for Christmas dinner so people could kinda snack throughout the day.

Our feast this year was Bacon Wrapped Dates, stuffed mushrooms, meatballs, maple bacon dip, jalapeno bacon dip,  tortilla strips from Costco and Sausage Queso, pumpkin cheese cake, left over charcuterie, Dots Pretzels (Never had them?!?  Oh MY GOODNESS!  Go get you some.  They are amazing!), and chips.  Of those, we made the dates, mushrooms, both dips, meatballs, and pumpkin cheesecake completely from scratch – with NO RUNNING WATER.

How did we cope?

Frozen Pipes Lesson #1 – Recreate a functional kitchen sink.

I think that this was the amongst the most frustrating things I experienced.  I wanted to wipe off the counter, but then I’d have to put a bucket under the berkey to catch the extra water from wetting a dish cloth.  OR I’d have to pull out a water bottle and use just a tiny bit to wet the cloth.

But about halfway through the (almost) week, I asked myself – “How did pioneer women do it?”  They only had outdoor wells.  They didn’t have running water.  They kept a partially filled bowl of water on the counter or table.

When I needed to rinse off my hands?  I used he water.  When I needed to moisten a dish cloth to wipe down counters?  I used the bowl of water.  As long as we weren’t wiping down raw meat juice or something else that could be contaminated with bacteria, that bowl of water worked wonderfully, and we didn’t really have to change it more than twice a day.

Frozen Pipes Lesson #2 – Even with electricity to pump water, outdoor well pumps freeze.

We had planned on using our outdoor well if we had power, but were without running water.   And we had electricity and were without water.   I mean, we do have three wells on the property which are not attached to our main water line.  We tried to use one of the wells, but because it uses an electric pump, which means that it holds the water in the pipes, those outdoor pipes were frozen.

I will be the first to admit, I didn’t even try to use our well bucket on another well.  Know what a well bucket is?  It’s a ‘bucket’ that’s about 6 inches wide and about 3 feet long.  It holds 3 gallons of water.  I guessed that the water in the well would also likely be frozen, but I didn’t test that out.  I will likely try that next time – though I hope that we don’t have a repeat for a long time.

Frozen Pipes Lesson #3 – Sourcing Water – Have empty buckets

Ideally, we would want to have access to water or have a large stash of water at the house.  I must admit since moving into a house that does NOT have a basement, this has been a challenge for us.  We do have some waterbricks and a five gallon camping water jug with a spigot, but they were – you guessed it – outside and frozen solid.

Because we didn’t have usable water at our house (not more than 6 single gallons and 4 cases of Costco water bottles), we had to bring water in from another source.  Having large empty buckets to transport water is a must. We hauled 40 gallons of water at a time from mom’s house to ours.  About a month prior, I had been watching Facebook Marketplace, and a guy was selling food grade 4 gallon square buckets for each.  I didn’t need them at the time, but I purchased 10.   Those 10 buckets with lids made transporting the water so much easier.

Lesson #4 – We needed hot water ON DEMAND! 

Now, granted, we had electricity and we had gas, so we could have easily heated water every time we wanted to wash dishes, but dog-gone-it!  That takes SO MUCH time.  So I was talking with a friend of mine from Kansas.  She said when her mom was without water, but had electricity, she kept a crockpot full of water on warm.

OH MY GOODNESS!  This revolutionized my time without water.  We have (cough) four crockpots (cough), so we kept one or even two going with water in them so that we always had hot water to wash dishes. This made all of the difference in the world!

Frozen Pipes Lesson #5 –  Give yourself extra time for cooking.

Cooking from scratch is MUCH HARDER without running water.  Why?  Because you know that finite number of measuring cups that you need to use ten times over?  You have to wash them when you run out of them.  Same goes for cooking utensils, cleaning up your messes, etc.  When you can’t ‘clean as you go’ cooking actually takes much longer.

Frozen Pipes Lesson #6 –  There’s a method to doing dishes without running water.

Most of us take our dishwashers for granted.  I remember eating at my grandmother’s house growing up.  She didn’t have a dishwasher, so all of her dishes had to be done by hand after dinner.  I HATED doing dishes at her house, but I learned a ton of lessons.

• Start with the least dirty dishes and work to the most dirty dishes.  Think about it, if you wash that frying pan coated in grease first, everything after it will be fighting against the dirty water created by that dirty pan.
• Make sure that you rinse dishes thoroughly.  If you don’t rinse them well, the soap left on the dishes will cause digestive issues that will keep you needing to use the bathroom a lot and it won’t be pleasant.  And you don’t want to have to run to the bathroom all the time, especially if you don’t have running water.
• Your dishwasher sterilizes your dishes for you.  You should consider sterilizing your dishes.  How?  I would wash many dishes using my crockpot heated water.  After I washed them, I set them in a clean side of the sink.  Once I had amassed a good deal of dishes, I would take a 2 cup measuring cup of water from the second crockpot – the water is very hot to boiling even on warm, and using the handled measuring cup, I would ladle the boiling water over the dishes in the second part of the sink.  As I moved the dishes from the second sink bowl to the drying rack, I would reposition the dish so that the hot to boiling water could coat the entire inside of the dish and then pour that water into another dish repeating the process until I had moved all of the dishes from the second bowl of the sink to the dish drying rack.

Frozen Pipes Lesson #7 – Create an Indoor Privvy

One of the first two preparedness investments I made after two big ones – a Berkey and a Pressure canner was something incredibly simple – were a snap on toilet seat lid for a standard size 4-6 gallon bucket and a five gallon water container with a spigot.  Between the plastic toilet lid, kitty litty litter, and heavy duty trashbags, we were all outfitted to be without a toilet.

A couple of words to the wise.

• The best place to set up an ‘indoor privvy’ is in a bathroom on the main floor of your house.  Even if all of the bedrooms are on the second floor, you want your ‘indoor outhouse’ to be on the floor of your home where you spend most of your time.   Forunately, it’s portable, so if you want to take it upstairs at night you can.  We had a very tight bathroom at our last house, and we still had room for the bucket with toilet lid.
• Use the toilet for anything liquid.  You don’t want to be hauling bags of both liquid and solid to the trash if you can help it.  Use the actual toilet for urine.  We would pour some of our water into the top of the toilet once a day in order to flush the liquid waste down.  If you need to do more than pee, THEN – and ONLY then – should you use the portable toilet.
• Once you’ve needed to use the portable toilet, you should scoop between 1/3 and 1/2 cup of kitty litter into the toilet.  This will help absorb any liquid that is there and will help curtail any stench.

Being without water is NEVER fun.  By the end of our six days without water, both my oldest daughter and I were both ready to have running back.  I can’t say that we didn’t grumble by day 6 either, but while it wasn’t fun, it was doable.

What About You?

Nobody likes to be without running water.  Has there every been an extended time when your family has been without water?  How did you handle it?  Do you have any other tips that can help us all as we prepare for a water outage?  Please share with us below in the comments so that we can all be better prepared.   And as you prepare your family for a water emergency, remember . . .

You’ve got this, Mama!