We discovered last night that there was no water coming out of the hot taps in our house. Straightaway we suspected a frozen pipe in the loft since the cold water was fine. Went up to find that the header tank for the heating system and the larger main water tank both had ice on the water surface. Neither of the inlet supplies to the tanks were working and the outlet pipe from the header tank was frozen. Clearly a couple of blocked pipes up in the loft. We left the heating on overnight and opened the loft hatch to let some warm air in. This morning water coming out of the hot taps as it should.
Now, our loft is well insulated and all the pipes and tanks are lagged. The overnight temperatures in our part of North Yorkshire have been extremely low (typically below -10ºC) recently.
My question is this: how can we stop this happening again? Clearly the loft insulation is working and stopping heat escaping into the loft. The insulation on the pipes is quite thick (not sure how thick but maybe 1 inch) and the tanks are covered with foam blankets but this is clearly not enough for these exceptionally low temperatures. We are planning to leave the hatch open until it warms up a bit but I do wonder what to do in the future.
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