Homeowner Guides
Winterize Like You Mean It
Pittsburgh winters park in the teens and dip to single digits, and they find every corner a house owner skipped. Here's the deep version of winter prep — one thorough October afternoon instead of a January emergency.
The short version: frozen pipes and dead furnaces are the two winter disasters, and both are mostly preventable in one October afternoon. Water first, heat second, then the envelope and the driveway.
Water: where winter does its expensive damage
- Disconnect and drain garden hoses. A connected hose traps water in the spigot, and the split happens inside the wall where you can't see it.
- Close the interior shut-off valves for outdoor spigots. Older Pittsburgh houses often have a small valve inside — basement ceiling, near where the spigot exits. Close it, then open the outside spigot and leave it open so the run drains.
- Insulate exposed pipe runs. Foam sleeves on anything in a crawlspace, garage, or along the rim joist where the basement meets the outside walls. Cheap, and each run takes minutes.
- Know your main water shut-off — usually the basement wall nearest the street, by the meter. Our shut-offs guide walks the whole house. Find it in October, not by flashlight in February.
- Never set the thermostat below 55°F, even when traveling. Below that, pipes inside exterior walls start losing their margin.
- On single-digit nights: open the cabinet doors under sinks that sit on exterior walls, and run a pencil-thin drip of cold water at the faucets farthest from the main. Moving water resists freezing.
If a pipe freezes anyway: leave the faucet open — flow relieves pressure as it thaws — and warm the pipe gently from the faucet end with a hair dryer or warm towels. Never an open flame. If you see a bulge or a crack, or water shows up where it shouldn't, shut the main and call a plumber.
Heat: service it before the season, not during
- Book furnace service in early fall. Once the first cold night hits, techs book out for weeks. A real service is more than a filter swap: heat exchanger inspection (that's the carbon monoxide safety piece), burners cleaned and checked, blower and motor looked over.
- Change filters monthly in heavy season. A choked filter makes the furnace work harder exactly when you need it most.
- Keep three feet clear around the furnace and water heater — no boxes, and never paint or solvent cans near a burner.
- Bleed the radiators. In hot-water systems — common in older Pittsburgh stock — a radiator that gurgles or heats unevenly usually just has trapped air: radiator key, slow hiss, close it when water appears. Steam systems are their own animal; if yours bangs or won't heat, find a heating tech who genuinely knows steam.
- Space heater rules, non-negotiable: hard level floor, three feet from anything that burns, plugged straight into the wall — never an extension cord or power strip — and off when you leave the room or go to sleep.
Carbon monoxide: winter is CO season — fuel-burning heat plus closed windows. Detectors on every level and near sleeping areas, fresh batteries now. If an alarm sounds, get everyone outside first and make the calls from out there. Don't ventilate and shrug it off; find the cause.
The envelope: keep the heat you paid for
- Clear gutters and downspouts after leaf drop. Ice dams start in clogged gutters.
- Understand the real ice-dam fix. Ropes of icicles every winter mean attic heat is melting roof snow that refreezes at the cold eaves. The cure is attic insulation and air sealing, not chipping ice — an insulation contractor can assess what your attic actually needs.
- Weatherstrip the exterior doors. If a dollar bill slides out of a closed door without resistance, that gap runs all season.
- Shrink-film window kits on the leakiest rooms. Unglamorous, a few dollars a window, and they genuinely work on drafty old sashes.
Outside: before the first storm
- Irrigation, if you have it: shut off and drain — sprinkler systems typically need a compressor blow-out, which is a quick pro visit.
- Bring in terra-cotta and ceramic pots. Freeze-thaw shatters them where they stand.
- Buy shovels and ice melt before the first storm, not the morning after, when every shelf in town is bare. If you have concrete poured within the last year or so, use sand or a concrete-safe de-icer on it — plain rock salt is hard on fresh surfaces.
Call a pro now, not in January
Three things that should never wait for the season to start:
- A furnace with a no-heat history. If it limped or quit last winter, this is the year it fails on the coldest night. Have it assessed now.
- A pipe run that has frozen before. It will freeze again. A plumber can insulate, reroute, or add heat cable properly.
- Gutters you can't safely reach. An hour of a pro's time beats a ladder accident, every time.
The October phone call is cheap and calm. The January one is neither.
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