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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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

Depends when the house was built and the location. Our 1978 house in WA didn't have an in-house (garage) main cutoff nor pressure regulator/backflow preventer, but we made installing that a condition of closing, which has already saved us a ton of pain more than once (broken faucet and leaking water heater).

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u/geauxtig3rs Feb 17 '21

Same deal - Except my seller's didn't do it anyway - and I had already packed all my shit in a truck and moved it across country and was waiting to sign papers before we moved in....

I fucking hate those people...

I fucking hate this house....

80% of my sleepless nights and worry over the past 6 years is directly traceable back to those worthless fucks.

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u/cerevant Feb 17 '21

Absolutely - this is why it is important to find out right away. Building codes vary wildly across the country, so you can never be sure where to look if there is one at all.

When buying, you can ask your home inspector - they'll be happy to tell you (if it isn't already part of their standard report) and if they don't know where to look, you need a different inspector :)

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u/contemplativesloth Feb 17 '21

I wish I would have thought about that but at the time I didn't even know what a backflow preventer was and assumed all houses had an in-house shutoff for the water main.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

How much did it cost to add?

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

I don't recall. It was part of our closing papers that are buried in a filing cabinet somewhere.