During the cold winter months freezing pipes become a potential catastrophic issue. One of the most common places for this to happen is the water supply to your kitchen. The reason for this is because the majority of kitchen sinks face an outside wall so a person can look out a window instead of just a wall of tile or other common kitchen materials. During construction, it is hard to fit the proper insulation between the pipes and the outside wall sheeting. Most times the insulation needs to be squeezed to a smaller thickness thus losing some ability to keep the cold away from the pipes.
Other factors contribute to this problem such as whether there is a heated basement below the kitchen and the prevailing wind direction in relation to the kitchen. Some pipes only freeze in the coldest of cold weather and only once in a while, usually over night. One simple way to avoid this is to simply leave your cabinet doors open and leave a very small stream of water running from the faucet. Another more permanent way is to install a small “toe plate” heater under the sink cabinet. This heater is placed below the cabinet at floor level. The major function of this heater in to add some heating to the kitchen with a small fan blowing the hot air quietly into the space, especially the area where one would stand while working in the kitchen, hence the term “toe plate heater”. They can be electric or piped directly into your existing baseboard heating system.
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