Will tubular heaters be enough to stop pipes freezing in an empty home without heating?

[StripeyHatOnAHook]

We are about to complete on a detached house that is heated with a wood stove. It pumps out plenty of heat and is very cosy, but obviously can only be used when the house is occupied and initially we won't be living there full time.The house is rural and in a colder part of the country.

Would plug in tubular heaters sited as close to pipes and the water tank as we can be enough to prevent pipes freezing?

Can you drain the system so there’s no water to freeze? Or will you be visiting from time to time until you move?

If the latter, I found electric convectors on timers set in hallways and near vulnerable spots worked well. Better still if they have timers and thermostats.

Visiting from time to time. We won't be in a position to move fully for some time due to work but are hoping to get up at least monthly to check on things.

Really helpful to hear from soneone with practical experience of the same problem, thank you.

Drain it down. My insurance requires draining down or the heating has to be set so the house can not drop below 7C and the house has to be visited/inspected weekly when unoccupied, heating left on or not.

I don't think it is possible for anyone to say. It depends on where you put them, what the pipework and heating system is like, how much power. There are loads of variables.

What you could do is make the house more resistant. You could do stuff like insulate the pipework, install electric radiators, maybe have an auto/remote shut off value for the cold water circuit.

I think you would struggle to sell a house with only a log burner, so maybe think about getting some sort of boiler fitted. You also have the issue of how you get hot water if there is only a wood stove.

What I will add is that a flood/release of cold water can be absolutely devastating having watched a near neighbour go through it.

I have a lot of water main pipes in my house that are exposed to very cold areas so I am very careful to keep the house above a certain temperature and run the cold water when it gets very cold.

I use a pipe heater in the garage, with a frost stat. It is positioned by the incoming waterman and under the water softener. The garage is integral and has CWI and doesn't seem to get really cold. The cost is small.

However

I used to have a second home. The insurers said it had to be heated to 12C when unoccupied, which I did, using the gas CH. It was not very expensive, because, in England, even in winter, the outdoor temperature is around that a lot of the time, but gets colder at night and in cold spells. When I visited, the house was dry and did not feel cold, and came up to temp when I turned up the heating

And

In a frosty spell during the night in a cold winter (might have been around 2010) the supply pipe feeding a cold water tank in the loft froze. There had been no movement of water as the house was unoccupied, and not enough heat had leaked up through the loft insulation to prevent it freezing.

The burst caused a lot of damage.

The insurers paid up because the house was heated to their requirements, and I stayed there most weekends so it was not classed as uninhabited for 30 days. If you have just bought the house and are not living there, they will not give you such good cover.

If you have any loft tanks or pipes, I strongly recommend turning off the water, and draining the cold tank by running a bath tap. Open the loft hatch and some warm air will rise up (this will be costly if you have an unfelted roof with bare tiles. Scottish homes usually have sarking boards which are much better.)

There will still be a residue of water in the pipes, but a burst will only release a few pints, if you have turned off the supply and drained the tank. It probably won't happen, but if it does, damage will be slight if you immediately turn the water off again.

Pipe insulation slows heat loss, but does not prevent it, so your pipes will reach freezing point, but if you are lucky the cold will not last long enough. A frosty spell with no sun will penetrate any part of a house that is not heated, and the loft will freeze in a matter of hours. Pipe insulation saves money by reducing heat loss from hot pipes.

Pipes freeze quite quickly, but tanks have great thermal mass, and take much longer.

If you have a hot water cylinder, you can't drain it, so insulate it well and leave the immersion heater on its lowest setting. This will not cost much because you are not running hot taps and using up the hot water.

OOI, I advise against sprayed roof insulation, which tends to cause rot and other damage.

BTW, if you are heating an unoccupied space, I recommend oil-filled radiators. They have no part that gets hotter than a teapot, so AFAIK they can't start fires, even if a piece of paper falls on them, or a curtain blows against them. Pipe heaters are much the same,

Most electric heaters, and especially fan heaters, are not as safe.

You need some low heating and ventilation in an empty property in winter or youll get damp and other problems.

I am someone that went on holiday one January and did not leave the heating on. While we were away a mains pipe in the loft froze and burst. Our wonderful neighbours got a plumber to turn the water off where it joins the street but there was a lot of damage.
The advice from the plumber who fixed our pipes, was to have the central heating coming on twice a day with the thermostat set to 14 degrees and the loft hatch left open. I have always stuck to this advice. A friend went away for 4 weeks in the winter and it was a condition of her insurance that she drained the tank and had the property visited once a week.
I live in a warm part of the UK.

It’ll be a right cold house if there is only one source of heating in one room.

that’s like the house i was brought up in. It was Baltic. Ice on the insides of the windows. Going to the loo was quite a thought.

You don’t want to live like that. Youll need something else. I’d suggest whatever you get won’t be cheap but I’d go for either wall mounted electric or oil filled electric radiators on timers. Probably just this year wirh some kind of central heating fitted for next year. Those tube heaters are for greenhouses. They won’t be warm enough for big rooms.

Thank you everyone. The house does have radiators but they currently run from a back boiler on the stove so again only possible when the house is occupied.

For now we've opened the loft hatch (pipes are lagged), turned off the stopcock and set up oil filled electric heaters on timers to be on all night and intermittently during the day, and also set up security cameras so if the worst does happen at least it won't be left for weeks.

It's not a long term solution but hopefully it will get us through this winter while we work out the best heating methods for this house ready for next year.

It's actually a lovely warm house, it's just not set up to be heated when it's not occupied because it always was occupied.

When you are heating a house for frost protection, it's a thermostat you need, not a timer.

If you set it on the assumption that daytime will be relatively warm... and it isn't... then your house will be too cold.

If you use a thermostat and no timer... and the day is warm... the thermostat will turn the heat off.

And if the day is unexpectedly cold... it will turn the heat on.

I had a house like that. We just drained it when we went away for the winter.