Water Damage From Frozen Pipes in Eagan, MN

Why Water Damage Caused By Frozen Pipes Is A Huge Disaster

Water damage resulted from frozen pipes in this home while the customers were away. Unfortunately, the heat was turned down too low, and the pipes froze, then burst. The entire basement was flooded. If you have the same problem as this and are looking for someone to repair it, give us a call!

Watch our Video and You’ll Learn:

• What Will Happen If Your Water Pipes Freeze.
• Reasons Why You Need Not To Lower Down The Temperature Of Your Water Heater.
• What Water Damage Could Look Like.

Listen To The Audio

Enjoy this transcript below!

Chris: Hey, everybody, Chris, Champion Plumbing. We’re in a house today in Eagan, Minnesota. It looks like this customer had a lot of water damage. Out here with Adam. Adam came out here, assessed the damage. I see a lot of water damage. This is what happens when you let your pipes freeze, and then they then. Then we have all this water that comes down and destroys your basement. Let’s take a walk. Let’s go look in the next room adjacent to it. You can see blower fans are all over the place. This is all damage from the water, quite a bit. All right, Adam, show us what you got.

Adam: So, because they went on vacation for a month and didn’t turn off their water … Please turn your water off when you go on vacation any longer than a night, especially in the winter in Minnesota. They ran their furnace too low, and now they’re dealing with this while they’re in Hawaii.

Chris: Let’s see what we got up here.

Adam: Up here is our problem. It’s between the floor and the shower, somewhere up there, where we were getting a whole bunch of water to come down. We’re going to isolate this area, turn on the water, find where the leaks are, and fix them.

Chris: Perfect.

Adam: So that’s where we’re at.

Chris: As I said, we’ve a bunch of crew here. We’re not at the house by ourselves.

Adam: Nope.

Chris: We’ve got a lot of crew trying to fix this house, put it back to where it was. Give you a little walk around quick, and then I’m going to let you go. Me and Adam are going to turn on the water. We’re going to try to find some leaks, and then hopefully assess that. I’ll get back to you a little bit. We’ll let you know what we find.

All right, Chris Champion Plumbing again. What we have in here, we have access. We’re trying to find where the leak is behind there. Sometimes you can’t go right through that, so we have to make an access point. Adjacent to this room is a wall inside a closet and there’s Adam again with tools.

All right, you can see Adam didn’t take that Sawzall and bury it into the wall. He barely pushed it into that drywall. We don’t want to cut what’s behind there. We just want to be able to make access. Adam, it looks like that’s drywall’s soaked, huh?

Adam: It’s just soaked. It’s soaked.

Chris: The drywall is wet. The floor right in front of him is pretty soaked. You can kind of see it slanting there, so now we have access to the tub on the other side, which is what we needed. Adam, is at a copper pipe on the right side by that stud?

Adam: Yeah, we’ve got a copper coming through here, over into here.

Chris: It’s quite possible that copper pipe that’s at that 90-degree elbow could have split there and that’s where the water could be spraying.

Adam: We’ll find out.

Chris: Yeah. All right, so what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to turn the water on. I’m going to communicate with Adam. I’m going to turn the water on and he’s going to tell me where he sees a leak. This is going to be a multistage process. Stay tuned. Chris and

Adam coming at you from Champion Plumbing in Eagan, Minnesota.

All right, we’re back. We think we might have found the leak, Adam, what did you find?

Adam: You think? I think we did.

Chris: Oh, yeah. I don’t think water would …

Adam: That’ll do it.

Chris: That probably wouldn’t seal the water up.

Adam: No, not at all.

Chris: All right, we’re going to keep looking around. We’re going to fix that and hope that that does the trick. We’re going to keep adding water after that’s fixed, see if we can find more leaks. Stay tuned.

All right, one thing we’re going to do here for you is we’re going to show you how Adam is going to replace that 90-degree bend. We use what’s called ProPress, a newer technology. We can still sweat and solder as we need to, but this is a sure way. Adam looks like he’s going to cut more wall open. Normally would be a little more gracious with cutting the drywall, but all this drywall is so wet. There’s almost no point. It’s all going to come down anyway, a good portion of it. He is going to make sure that he has enough pipe there. He’s going to cut off the old and we’re going to put in the new.

Again, Champion Plumbing out of Eagan, Minnesota. Hopefully, you don’t have this happen to your house, but hey, if you need some plumbing done, make sure you reach out at 651-365-1340. Adam, after this, are we going to connect it?

Adam: We’re going to turn the water back on and make sure we got no more leaks. If we have more leaks, we’re going to hunt those down and find those too.

Chris: Perfect. It’s slowly connecting the dots. We turned the water on downstairs a little bit. This was the first culprit that showed some damage, so you can see the ProPress fittings. They use these a lot. It’s a great way to make sure that our fittings connect. Like I said, newer technology.

Adam: That’s tough to cut.

Chris: For every rib that you see on these fittings, we have a machine that’s going to squeeze these fittings tight together. It makes a water-tight seal. Just going to take a little more off that?

Adam: Yes, sir. Then we should be good to press, then cut the water on. Hopefully, call it a day and not find any more for their sake, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, I couldn’t imagine. The extent of the damage in the house has got to be just thousands and thousands of dollars. This is what we’re using right here called the ProPress. We’re going to put the correct fitting size on there because it’s using a half-inch copper. This machine has half-inch, three-quarter, and bigger. Watch how quick this is. He puts the jaws right on the rib there and squeezes. Simple as that. All right, just going to finish it up for the remaining three ribs on there. We’re going to finish this connection. We’re going to turn the water back on and we’ll let you know what we see.

All right, my phone’s a little wet now. Looks like we have another wet connection. Well, I should say leak. We’re going to go upstairs now and see what Adam found. There’s other people here in the house, so you may see other people. The customer is not here.

All right, Adam.

Adam: Woohoo.

Chris: We’re back on video.

Adam: Yay.

Chris: What’d you find?

Adam: That wasn’t the only joint not attached. We’ve got another one back here.

Chris: All right.

Adam: Way back, here, so it’s going to be a little harder to see on the video, but-

Chris: Right behind that two by four?

Adam: Yeah, there’s a T that’s right here, a T joint. She’s not connected either.

Chris: It looks like it almost came here, broke there, and probably traveled with a pressure as it was going down. All right.

Adam: I’ll fix this one too.

Chris: All right, more to come.

Adam: Then try again.

Chris: All right, we’ll check back in a little bit. Okay, Adam’s out there going to get the tools and I should say more material that he needs, but where he’s talking about is in here, back in here. Let’s see if I can get the camera in there, just to kind of show you. It’s a little bit dark in there.

This is some of the hurdles the guys work with. He cut this here because they have piping going right in between the two by fours and working its way through there. This is why we need access areas and why we have to cut access to get to some of these pipes, just because we don’t know how far this goes. Obviously, we want to make sure that we’re taking care of this the right way, so we’re going to check in a little while to see where Adam has gotten. Hopefully, we can get this sealed up for the customer. We’ll see how far these cracks and leaks go. All right, talk to you soon.

All right, Adam, what do you think? Should we give it another shot?

Adam: We’ll give her another shot.

Chris: All right, we’ll take a look.

Adam: What’s the worst that could happen? More water?

Chris: More water. All right, you can see in there. He’s fixed the leaks, made new connections. Good job, Adam. All right, we’re going to go downstairs. We’re going to check to see if we get wet. Standby. All right, Adam. What’s the verdict?

Adam: We are done, solved.

Chris: We’re good?

Adam: We are good. We are full pressure to the house now. We have no water dripping from the ceiling except for stuff that’s already soaked.

Chris: That’s wet. Don’t-

Chris: Other than that, we’re all sealed up. What it was was two joints popped and they were frozen, completely off the solder. It’s not a bad solder job or anything like that. It’s just, when water freezes, it expands. What it did is it just popped a couple joints. That can relieve the pressure and cause this.

Chris: Perfect.

Adam: Again-

Chris: We turned on the main water meter, but not the meter south, but we opened that ball valve right above it. We slowly opened that ball valve. We were listening for water. We heard it slowly stop running, and then we look at the meter right here. You can’t really see the numbers on it right now, but we made sure the numbers aren’t moving, checked for leaks. Everything looks good. We at Champion Plumbing did another job, a good job.

Adam: Thanks.

Chris: All right.

Adam: Turn your water off when you go out of town.

Chris: Yeah, don’t keep your water on, especially if your house gets cold, or something like this will happen. All right, if you have any plumbing needs, hopefully, you don’t run into anything like this, but if you do, or if you need anything done, feel free to reach us.

Adam: Give us a call.

Chris: Yeah. What’s the number, Adam?

Adam: 95, nope, 651-365-1340.

Chris: Yeah, it’s right in the bottom of your screen there. The website’s on the bottom of your screen, Champion Plumbing. Thanks again. Don’t forget to subscribe.