I live in Southeast Michigan and recently bought and moved in to a century home. We've been getting a cold wave the past couple of days with sub-zero temperatures.
For the past 36 hours, one of my 2nd floor bathrooms has been unable to produce cold water when the cold water tap is turned on, but hot water works fine. Same problem with the shower for that bathroom (only hot water), and the toilet no longer flushes.
No issues with the other 2nd floor bathroom, nor the 3rd floor bathroom, nor any other parts of the house.
This problematic bathroom is built over a garage and was an add on to this 100 year old home. It's bit hard to trace where the pipes go through between the basement and this 2nd floor bathroom, but I suspect it's on one of the walls of the garage, so basically an exterior wall, and I suspect the pipe froze somewhere in there, so I'm very concerned with bursting at this point.
The connection from the water meter in the basement appears to be copper tubes. The connection under the vanity of this bathroom sink is pex tube, but I have no idea what the pipe material is through the walls of the first floor.
I turned up the central heating in my house. I also put a space heater to heat the pex pipe under the vanity according to suggestions I read on reddit, but this didn't help, as I suspected since I think the freezing is occurring somewhere on the first floor. I'm considering putting a space heater in the garage during waking hours.
I have a concrete question, which is that, from my understanding, there's some result from physics concluding that the hot water pipe should freeze prior to the cold water pipe when subject to the same conditions. The fact that my hot water is perfectly fine seems to suggest that the conditions are not the same, which could possible be due to:
Different routing of the hot water and cold water pipes to this particular bathroom. I think usually they're parallel, but perhaps that's not the case here for whatever reason (note the water boiler in my basement is by my HVAC, whereas my water meter is in a completely different room in the laundry room closet so perhaps that explains it? not really familiar with this stuff and it's not intuitive to me why they're not in closer proximity to one another)
the hot water pipe is better insulated than the cold water pipe
Do these interpretations make sense?
I called a plumber today and was basically given the "there's not much we can do at this point response." After closing hours, I realized I should've just pressed a plumber to come in and bring some gadgets to tell me where the pipes are and help me thaw them!
