For the third time since we moved in the pipes around the house have frozen and burst. Not surprising in that it was -6C overnight, and had been zero or less since midnight. That's long and cold enough to freeze the water in the pipes. The giveaway was the house pump running continuously.

If I was building the house anew I wouldn't be using plastic irrigation pipes for the plumbing. But that's what's there so we are currently stuck with it as a recurring problem.

Overnight it was minus 6 degrees, from midnight to dawn.

When I say our pipes "burst" that's not always exactly correct. What happened is the expansion caused by the freezing pulls the plastic plumbing fittings apart. (We have had some older corner/right-angled plastic fittings crack. This time it was just joint expansion.)

Each time it happens I invest in more gate valves, which gives me the ability next time to quarantine sections to isolate where the leak might be, as most the time the damage is underground and tracing the damaged section is problematic.

Last time it was a really long investigation. Weeks. I ended up investing in an electronic device with headphones that indicates high pressure leaks. It works really well on exposed pipes, not so good in underground popes. I did all that and still had quite a long line which included the bathroom, toilet, laundry, kitchen, outside corner taps and sheep trough. That's a lot of corners and joins to dig up!

This time though it was the injury itself that helped. As the day warmed up, and I worked my way along the line digging exploratory holes, the frozen pipes defrosted. As the loosened fitting liquefied, more and more water came out. I was no where near checking that spot, but as I walked past looking for a smaller shovel to dig out the far corner tap I noticed water pooling next to the bathroom.

I dug down, and as I dug more and more water emerged. It went from a wet patch to a hole filled with water with a bubbling pulse at the bottom. I shut all the water off, cut the pipe and repaired it, including yet another gate valve in the line.

Problematic as it is using agricultural pipe, its very easy to fix!