← Back to Blog · December 2025 · Seasonal
By Adan Miranda, CPMM · Total Home · The Woodlands, TX
February 2021 taught The Woodlands a lesson most residents had never needed to learn. When Uri hit and temperatures dropped into single digits, a lot of homes that had never seen a burst pipe suddenly had several. The repairs ran from a few thousand dollars to well over $100,000 in cases with significant water damage. Most of it was preventable.
Houston-area homes are built for heat, not cold. Pipes run in exterior walls and attics without the insulation you'd find in a Minnesota house. That's the reality here, and it means that when a real freeze comes, preparation matters more than it does in colder climates where infrastructure is built for it.
I ask every new client where their main shutoff is. A surprising number don't know. If a pipe bursts, the difference between turning off the water in thirty seconds and hunting for the shutoff for twenty minutes can be tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Find it now, make sure it turns, and tell everyone in the house where it is.
Disconnect garden hoses before a freeze. A connected hose traps water back into the faucet body, which can crack even a frost-free spigot. Cover outdoor faucets with insulated foam covers, available at any hardware store for about $3 each.
Shut off your irrigation system at the controller and at the backflow preventer. If you have a professionally installed system with a vacuum breaker, it needs to be drained or wrapped. This is one of the more common sources of freeze damage I see, partly because people assume the system is protected when it's just turned off.
When temperatures are forecast to drop below 20 degrees, let faucets connected to pipes on exterior walls drip overnight. Both hot and cold. Moving water is harder to freeze than still water, and the small cost of a dripping faucet is nothing against a repair bill.
Open cabinet doors under bathroom and kitchen sinks on exterior walls. It sounds like a small thing. It lets warm air from the room reach the pipes rather than leaving them in an enclosed, cold cabinet.
Pool pumps, filters, and heaters can crack in a sustained freeze. Keep your pump running through a freeze event rather than shutting it down; moving water resists freezing better than standing water. If you have a heater, a pool professional can advise on whether to run it or protect the equipment another way depending on your specific setup.
This is where things get harder. A vacant home during a hard freeze is the highest-risk scenario. You can't let faucets drip if nobody's there. You can't react if something starts to fail. The best preparation for a homeowner who travels during winter is to have someone checking the property and, if a serious freeze is forecast, willing to take action. That might mean a neighbor with a key, a property manager, or a service like ours.
Keep the heat on while you're away. Not warm, just above freezing. Fifty-five degrees is a reasonable floor. Don't turn the system off entirely to save on the gas bill during a stretch when temperatures are unpredictable.
If any of this gives you pause, that's exactly what Total Home is for. Members just call or text, and we handle the rest.
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