How to Keep Pipes From Freezing in an Iowa Winter

Where pipes actually freeze in a house

Pipes do not freeze randomly; they freeze where plumbing meets cold air. The repeat offenders are supply lines run through exterior walls — kitchen sinks on outside walls are the classic — plus crawl spaces, unheated garages with laundry lines, basement rim joists where drafts pour in, and outdoor hose bibs left connected. Water expands about nine percent when it freezes, and it does not politely stop for copper or PEX. The burst usually announces itself at thaw, not at freeze, which is why the flood arrives with the warm-up.

The habits that prevent most freeze events

Before winter: disconnect garden hoses, shut interior valves to hose bibs and drain them, and insulate the vulnerable runs you can reach — foam sleeves are cheap and genuinely work. During a hard snap: open the cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls so room heat reaches the pipes, and on the brutal nights let the most vulnerable faucet run a pencil-lead trickle, because moving water resists freezing. Leaving town in January? Keep the heat set no lower than the mid-50s and have someone check the house. Every one of these steps costs almost nothing.

How do I know a pipe has frozen — and what do I do first?

The classic sign is a faucet that drops to a trickle or nothing during a cold stretch while the rest of the house runs fine. First move: open the affected faucet and leave it open, so melting ice has somewhere to relieve pressure. Then get heat to the suspect section — a hair dryer, a heat lamp, warm towels, working from the faucet back toward the cold. Never use a torch or open flame on a pipe, ever. If you cannot find the frozen section or nothing thaws within a reasonable effort, stop and call before it bursts.

If the pipe has already burst

A split pipe may not leak until the thaw, so treat any frozen-pipe event as a possible burst-in-waiting: know where your main shutoff is before you start thawing, and watch the thawed section closely as flow returns. If water appears, close the main immediately and switch playbooks — our burst-pipe guide covers the first five minutes. This is also a true 24/7 call. A frozen line with a suspected split is exactly the situation where waiting for morning multiplies the damage.

Fixing the cause, not just the symptom

A pipe that froze once will freeze again unless something changes — that run needs insulation, rerouting out of the cold path, or the draft feeding it sealed. Repeat freeze locations in older Marion and Cedar Rapids homes are often solved permanently during other work, like a remodel or a repipe of aging galvanized lines. Hanna's techs are hourly with no quotas: after a freeze event we will tell you exactly why that line froze and the cheapest change that ends it, whether that is thirty dollars of foam or a rerouted supply.