Emergency Heat Repair: Protect Your House — and Your Pipes — While You Wait

When the heat dies on a January night, the clock that matters most isn't your comfort — it's your plumbing. A house holds its warmth for a while, but once interior temperatures slide towards freezing, water lines in exterior walls, crawlspaces, and garages start to freeze, and a single burst pipe routinely causes more damage than a decade of furnace repairs combined. Here's how to defend the house while help is en route.

Protect the pipes first

Open the cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls so room air reaches the plumbing. Let vulnerable faucets run at a pencil-lead trickle — moving water resists freezing. Open interior doors so the house shares its remaining warmth, but close off rooms nobody needs. Know where your main water shutoff is before you need it; if a pipe does let go, seconds matter. And if you'll be leaving the house, shut the main and consider draining fixtures rather than gambling.

Stopgap heat: the safe and the deadly

Electric space heaters are a fine bridge when used correctly: hard flooring, three feet of clearance from anything that burns, plugged straight into the wall — never a power strip — and never left running while everyone sleeps. What is never acceptable indoors: the oven with the door open, propane or kerosene heaters not rated for indoor use, charcoal anything, or a generator anywhere inside, garage included. Carbon monoxide from improvised heating kills people in New Jersey every winter; a cold night is survivable and CO poisoning often isn't.

Then get the real fix moving

No-heat calls take priority on Pacific Air's winter schedule — same-day in most of our service area, which runs from our Clifton shop across Passaic, Bergen, Essex, and Morris counties. The technician arrives licensed and EPA-certified, diagnoses the actual failure (ignitors, flame sensors, blower motors, and circulator pumps top the winter list), and puts the price in writing before repairs begin. If the system is old enough that a repair is throwing good money after bad, you'll get the honest replacement math too — your call, either way.