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High Winds, Hail, Frozen Pipes And Other Surprises Nature Expects Your Plumber To Handle | Bedford, TX

High Winds, Hail, Frozen Pipes And Other Surprises Nature Expects Your Plumber To Handle | Bedford, TX

Photo By Aleutie at istock

Our extensive training prepares us to figure out any situation within our range of expertise. If it requires a plumber, electrician, glass service, or a coordinated team effort with other experts, we’ll find a way to fix it. That’s one of our advantages: we’re a family-owned local business, grown over several generations, so we don’t use a corporate playbook to find our answers. In Bedford, TX and the surrounding DFW area, that’s why people rely on us. These days, nature is sending us more customers with challenging problems, too. So, we continue to grow and serve.

Mother Nature’s Challenges and Our Solutions

Many of the challenges we face here in the area are infrastructure-related, especially electrical. Wind, hail, and cold can disrupt the electrical supply, resulting in power outages and irregular power such as surges that affect our clients’ homes and electrical equipment. As the lights flicker, computers can suffer and just about everything electrical in the home can have a computer in it these days. Of course, thunder and lightning bring surges of another kind, much more intense and disruptive.

The lack of power also means a lack of heat, cooling, cooking, and even home medical equipment. Our electricians have a number of solutions for these problems, though. Meanwhile, as our customers are suffering in the cold, their home’s water pipes are exposed to it, too, slowly freezing, expanding, bursting open, and then, when things warm up, spraying or leaking. Who wants to come home to find that? Our plumbers not only can repair the damage but help our customers to identify pipes and risk and get them protected against the cold before trouble arrives.

Preventing Electrical Problems Brought on by the Weather

Whole-house protection beats specialized power strips for electrical surge protection and lightning arresting. A single unit integrated with your power panel protects all the circuits in your home and keeps everything from your children’s game system to your modern stove and refrigerator from having electronics problems.

Do You Have Backup Power?

Real backup power is a generator installed in a safe location to keep exhaust away from your home, and wired into your home’s power so it switches over smoothly and automatically when your power fails. If your home is prone to brief power disruptions, especially in windy weather, we can also provide UPS or uninterruptible power supply power for your home office or other critical location where you’re tired of rebooting every time the lights flicker. Your computer can get tired of the power fluctuations, too, and the UPS can help prevent that.

Heat and Health Are Critical

Everyone likes to stay warm, but for some of us, it’s an urgent situation. The same goes for electrical medical gear that many seniors have at home, helping with breathing at night or making backup oxygen for them. There’s equipment for lifting them up to get around and chair systems that take them up and down the stairs. Our electricians can add special circuits with backup power to keep support equipment functioning. A generator power supply can keep electricity available for these and other critical needs even for days if needed.

Inspecting for Pipes and Valves at Risk in Cold Weather

Cold weather has never been new to the area, but it’s been especially potent lately. We highly recommend having one of our plumbers check your home for plumbing that might be exposed to freezing temperatures, to help avoid costly pipe and valve damage and even burst pipes. We’ll look for lines running outside to your garage or shed, check for unprotected valves serving your yard and landscaping, and even make sure that indoor plumbing is in areas that are sufficiently heated or insulated that cold air won’t reach them and damage them, too.

There are solutions our plumber can provide, often easy ones, for most problems that we might find. An insulating wrap can do the job, and a thermostat-controlled electrical heating wrap can handle pipes that are outside your home. Our professionals can reroute basement pipes or ones under your house, so they’re protected, and replace valves for hoses and car washing with modern units that are self-draining to prevent damage by freezing water left inside them.

Responding to Cold Weather Plumbing Disasters

The pictures on the news from recent plumbing disasters after cold weather have been heart-rending. When the whole house loses heat, every pipe in the home is vulnerable to freezing and bursting, and flooding as they warm up can lead to terrible losses. We recommend that, whenever you have problems with your plumbing, you have us come and check it out right away. There are things our plumbers can do when your water slows or stops because of freezing that could keep you from problems later. Damage is not inevitable.

Pouring Rain Can Make a Mess of Your Basement

One more major surprise our plumbers would like to help you avoid is sewer backups, basement flooding, and related issues when the rains get heavy. We’re glad to examine your sewer and make sure that it’s in good shape and not vulnerable to infiltration by groundwater, pushing back into your home. The same goes for your basement, especially if it has cracked over time. Do you have sump pumps, and are they working? What happens if water enters your basement during heavy rains and the power goes out? Our plumbers have answers, including backup power for your pumps.

Get to Know Tioga Plumbing & Electric, Your Local Plumbers, and More

We don’t want to say we get ahead of nature’s surprises, but we do help our customers in the Bedford, TX area make wise moves to protect their homes from the wild weather that sometimes arrives here. We’ve been around since the 1950s and seen plenty. Our plumbers and electricians have developed plans and solutions to help homeowners relax and ride out life’s inevitable wild storms. Call us at Tioga Plumbing & Electric.