It actually stayed sunny all day with just a little afternoon haze, but it never got nearly above freezing and so promised a nice cold night.
Could have been worse but I’m pretty sure my pipes are trying to freeze. Nothing’s broken so far and I can continue to hope it doesn’t but I just got back from town to (finally) pick up my new Jeep hinges…
…and while there I dropped into the hardware store to pick up fresh plumbing supplies of the sort that don’t shelf well, like PVC cement. So as much as I hope I don’t have to crawl around under the cabin I’ll at least not be let down by lack of supplies.
Can you insulate the pipes or do the rats just eat through it right away
Funny you should ask, because I’ve been kicking myself for not getting under the cabin and checking the pipe insulation when it would have been merely difficult and not torturous. I hurt my shoulder in autumn and it was all I could do to get my firewood cut. I let some other things slide and they seem to be lining up to punish my sloth. I did of course insulate the pipes but the rats are a problem – so I don’t really know how well or even whether the bathroom pipe is insulated.
One you redo the insulation, you could always cut a chunk of PVC pipe lengthwise and clamp it over the insulation with large hose clamps to outwit the rats!
I have no idea how your pipes are insulated, but I saw one trick in a crawl space that might work: galvanized stovepipe – the kind that has a lengthwise “engagement lip” so that it can be opened up, put around something and snapped closed – was around an exposed pipe. The stovepipe was flush against the structure at the top and buried some distance into the dirt below (no idea how far). A few vertical columns of holes were drilled at intervals through which foam insulation was pumped until it came out the holes on the other side and around the top at the pipe/structure junction.
Assuming 6″ stovepipe and 1″ water pipe, that’s at least 2.5 inches of foam insulation around the pipe. Closed cell – “minimally expanding” – foam is supposed to be R 6.5/inch so that’s R 16 around the pipe. depending on how deep the pipe goes into the ground, I would expect the steel stovepipe would be fairly rodent-proof.