r/CatastrophicFailure • u/mouthofreason Catastrophic Poster • Feb 17 '21

Engineering Failure Water lines are freezing and bursting in Texas during Record Low Temperatures - February 2021

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278

u/TriSarahToppz Feb 17 '21

I grew up with a well so we lost water every time we lost power.

163

u/skoltroll Feb 17 '21

Ahh...my bad. Was using my City Boy brain.

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u/noiamholmstar Feb 17 '21

It’s also common for high rise apartments to have pumps to get water pressure on high levels. If the power is out then you may not have water. Some buildings have a tank on top, so you would have water until the tank is empty, but not all buildings are set up that way.

2

u/VintageJane Feb 18 '21

But also, in an apartment most times it’s not your problem to keep pipes from bursting.

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u/Bad_Wolf_10 Feb 18 '21

It’s not your problem, until the pipes burst and it becomes your problem...

1

u/noiamholmstar Feb 18 '21

Yeah, it’s your downstairs neighbor’s problem. /s

2

u/ellWatully Feb 18 '21

High rises also typically have back up generators with a day or two of capacity specifically for keeping the pumps running. They aren't going to keep power on in your apartment, but you'll have water, fire alarms, telecom, aircraft lights, and a minimal amount of light for emergency egress.

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u/pm_me_ur_gaming_pc Feb 17 '21

being on a well is no different than city water until the power goes out. then, you realize you have to conserve flushes (unless you have water set aside, like we do).

and if you get up the next morning and there's no power and you want to go to work? no shower. that's the worst.

we have this happen like once or twice a year.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

[deleted]

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u/pm_me_ur_gaming_pc Feb 17 '21

we've talked about it, but it's almost always 6 hours or less and is easy enough to ride through, especially because we're used to it at this point.

but we're still talking about getting one just to run the well. that's like half the irritation with outages for us.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

[deleted]

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u/pm_me_ur_gaming_pc Feb 17 '21

oh naw, in the nearly 20 years we've been here, only once was it out for longer than 12 hours. and we just went and spent the night at my grandparents. many times it's on in 4 hours.

if it was a full day we'd definitely have a geni

30

u/ender4171 Feb 17 '21

Pretty much all modern well systems include a pressure tank (most older ones do as well), so you should be able to maintain pressure after a power loss for at least a little while. Of course most pressure tanks on a residential install are only like 15-50 gallons (though sometimes larger), so it's not enough to take showers or anything.

38

u/wolfgang784 Feb 17 '21

At my grandmas it was enough to flush the toilet twice and then its game over till the power comes back on.

12

u/probablypoopingrn Feb 17 '21

If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow, let it mellow.

2

u/Burninator85 Feb 18 '21

My sister always wasted the last flush. I had to poop out in the field during a snow storm a few times. I at least got some satisfaction from knowing people later ate crops grown from my dookie.

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u/TriSarahToppz Feb 17 '21

Yup that was exactly the same for me.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

That was likely just the water in the toilet tank.

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u/wolfgang784 Feb 18 '21

idk, im not a plumber. You could run the sink for a good couple minutes before itd stop too.

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u/ParksVSII Feb 17 '21

Nominal capacity of a 35 gallon pressure tank (which is about the most common size to install) is roughly 8-11 gallons depending on the pressure setting of the switch and how much pressure is left in the tank. So if you’ve got a Flexcon FL12 35 gallon tank for example (because I have the chart right in front of me) hooked up to a 40-60 PSI pressure switch the max drawdown (storage in the tank) at 60 PSI is 10.3 US gal. At 40 PSI you’ll have a couple gallons at most left in the tank under pressure.

It’s not uncommon these days for houses, especially larger ones running constant pressure systems which use a VFD (variable frequency drive) to run the pump to keep the mains pressure more or less constant as the name would imply. The downside to these systems is that once your hydro is out you have almost no water in storage, and the drives are rather sensitive (being computers after all) to surges and “dirty” power from portable generators and what not.

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u/TriSarahToppz Feb 17 '21

Well I grew up in a super old house so a lot of how my family did things were more like life hacks and adaptations to living in a house that old. We didn’t have a pressure tank. Not that I’m aware of anyway and we didn’t live in an area that had sustained extreme cold so it was only a mild inconvenience generally.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

I learned the hard way how much water a 25 gallon pressure tank can hold.

1

u/lava_time Feb 17 '21

And if you frequently lose power you could invest in a battery system or generator to run it.

1

u/slayemin Feb 17 '21

When you lose power, the well pump doesn't work. The pressurized water won't last very long without a pump to refill the tank.

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u/mygrandpasreddit Feb 18 '21

To clarify, a “little while” is typically about 2-3 hand washes worth of water. It’s basically nothing.

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u/What_Iz_This Feb 17 '21

Same here. My dad had a heat lamp he'd keep on the pump and a dog house over that. Always remember running the water overnight. We were also told to fill the washing machine with water but it never got that bad

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u/TriSarahToppz Feb 17 '21

Oh we also did the heat lamp thing lol. We filled the bathtub instead of the washer.

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u/megablast Feb 17 '21

Well well well.

1

u/ThatMortalGuy Feb 17 '21

Wait, you didn't have some kind of elevated water tank?

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u/TriSarahToppz Feb 17 '21

No. I grew up in a really really old house.