Frozen Pipe Season: A Plumbing Company's Prep Plan

It's 6:15 on the first morning the forecast finally got right. Overnight low of 14°F. Your office line has nine voicemails, the after-hours phone has four more, and two of your techs are already texting that their own kitchen taps are trickling. By 8 AM you'll have more frozen pipe calls than trucks, and the real flood hasn't started yet. That comes when it warms up.

You can't stop the cold. You can decide, two weeks out, what your shop does when it lands. This is the prep plan we'd want on the wall before the first hard freeze: what to stock, who's on call, what the person answering the phone says, which calls go first, and how you look back at it afterwards.

Why frozen pipe calls hit plumbing differently

Most seasonal demand ramps up. Freeze events don't. They arrive as a wall, and usually as two walls.

The first wave comes the morning after a hard cold night: no water, a trickle at the kitchen sink, a frozen line to the washer in an unheated garage. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension puts the risk point for pipes at 20°F or below outside, which is a useful trigger for your own planning. Watch the 10-day forecast for that number, not for snow.

The second wave comes on the thaw. A pipe that split while frozen doesn't leak until the ice melts, and the same extension guide notes that a broken pipe will leak once it thaws. So the calls change from "I have no water" to "there's water coming through the ceiling." When a deep freeze broke in north Louisiana in January 2024, Red River Radio reported one Shreveport plumbing company fielding several dozen calls in a single morning, with two crews working long hours capping lines so families could get water back.

That's the shape of a plumbing winter call surge: a spike, a lull while everyone thinks it's over, then a bigger spike with active water damage. Plan for both, and plan for the second one to be worse.

The stakes for your customers are real money. State Farm says it paid over $181M on nearly 9,000 frozen pipe claims in 2022, with the average claim a little over $20,000. Every hour a split line runs adds to that bill. Speed on the thaw wave isn't a nice-to-have.

The two-week pre-season checklist

Truck stock for burst lines

Walk every van with the tech who drives it. You want each truck able to make a burst line safe and hold it without a supply house run, because the supply house will have a line out the door too. A generic list to start from:

• Repair couplings in the sizes and materials you see most (PEX, copper, CPVC)
• Push-fit fittings and caps for fast temporary fixes
• Curb and meter shutoff keys in the sizes your local utility uses
• Heat tape and pipe insulation for the "frozen but intact" calls
• A wet vac, buckets and drop cloths
• Pipe thawing gear your techs are trained on, plus a flashlight and spare batteries

Count it, write it down, and decide who restocks between waves. If you already track van stock, set minimums on the burst-repair parts now. Our post on plumbing inventory software covers how shops set those minimums so a van doesn't run dry halfway through a shift.

On-call rotation and the overtime budget

Your normal on-call schedule assumes one or two emergencies a night. A freeze can bring a dozen. Before the first cold snap:

• Name a primary and a backup on-call tech for every night of the forecast window, weekdays included
• Decide the maximum shift length before a tech has to stop, and write it down
• Set an overtime budget for the event. Example math: four techs, two extra hours a day, five days, at a loaded rate you know. Put that number in front of yourself before the overtime happens, not after
• Line up a dispatcher or office lead for early mornings, because the voicemails pile up overnight

Our guide to setting up an on-call rotation for service technicians goes deeper on fairness, pay and how to keep the same two people from carrying every storm.

Pricing after hours

Decide your after-hours and emergency pricing now, while nobody is standing in water. Write the rule, give it to whoever answers the phone, and stick to it. If you charge for travel on emergency calls, our post on how to charge for travel time walks through the common approaches so we won't repeat them here.

An intake script for burst-pipe calls

Whoever answers the phone during a freeze is your first responder. A good script saves the customer money and gives your tech a head start. Keep it short enough to read aloud:

1. Is water running right now? If yes, ask if they know where the main shutoff is. Walk them to it: basement wall where the line enters, a utility closet, or the curb box outside. Getting the water off is the single biggest thing they can do before you arrive.
2. Is any water near outlets, appliances or the electrical panel? If so, tell them not to touch wet electrical equipment or stand in water near it. Ready.gov's flood guidance says to turn off the electricity if it is safe to do so. If it isn't safe, they stay out of that area.
3. If it's frozen but not leaking: open the faucet on that line so water can move as it thaws. The American Red Cross advises keeping the faucet open and never using an open flame to thaw a pipe.
4. Where is the pipe? Crawlspace, exterior wall, attic, garage. This tells your tech what to bring.
5. Best callback number and access notes. Gate codes, pets, which door.

Print it. Tape it next to the phone. Give it to the answering service if you use one. If after-hours call handling is where you're losing work today, our post on after-hours calls for plumbing leads covers the options.

Triage order when the board fills up

You won't be able to take every call in the order it came in. Agree on a triage order in advance so the person on the phone isn't making it up at 7 AM:

1. Active leak. Water is running, or it was until they shut the main. This is where damage grows by the hour.
2. No water at all. Nothing is getting wet, but the household can't cook, flush or wash. Elderly customers and families with infants move up within this tier.
3. Frozen but intact. Low flow or one dead fixture, no visible damage. Often the customer can wait for daytime temperatures with the faucet open.
4. Preventive. Heat tape, insulation, a hose bib that needs a frost-free replacement. Book these for the lull between waves.

Be honest that this is a judgment call. A frozen line in a house with a space heater and a toddler might deserve more urgency than the list says. The list gives the office a default, and the owner or lead tech can override it.

Tell customers the truth about wait times

During a freeze, the call that costs you a customer is the one where nobody calls back. Tell people where they stand.

If you're running six hours behind, say six hours. If they're in tier three, explain that leaking homes go first and why, then tell them what to do while they wait (faucet open, cabinet doors open on exterior walls, heat on). Give a callback window and keep it. Most people will wait if they understand the plan. Very few will wait in silence.

One more trade-off: some owners stop booking preventive work entirely during the event. Others keep a little capacity for existing service agreement customers. Either is defensible. Pick one before the cold hits so the office isn't negotiating it on every call.

How FSM Navigator helps plumbing shops run a freeze

FSM Navigator runs the job from first call to paid invoice, and a freeze is where the dispatch part gets tested hardest.

Every job carries its own SLA deadline, so your active-leak calls and your heat-tape calls aren't sitting on the board with the same urgency. On Pro, intelligent dispatch evaluates SLA urgency, skills, proximity and workload, and keeps rebalancing through the day as conditions change. Your dispatcher can still reassign any job by hand.

On Pro, if a tech calls in sick, jobs that haven't started yet auto-reassign to the next best available technician, and a job with no free tech waits for your dispatcher instead of being double-booked.

The iOS and Android apps are on every plan, Free included, and they're offline-first. A tech in a crawlspace or a basement with no signal keeps working, and everything syncs when the phone reconnects.

On Enterprise, parts-aware dispatch won't assign a technician whose van stock lacks the parts the job requires, so the tech who shows up to a burst copper line has the couplings for it.

After the thaw: a 30-minute post-event review

Within a week of the second wave, sit down with your lead techs and the office. Keep it to half an hour and answer five questions:

• How many calls came in each day, and how many did we turn away or push?
• Which parts ran out first, and on which trucks?
• Did the on-call rotation hold, or did the same people carry it?
• What did overtime actually cost against the budget we set?
• Which part of the intake script did people skip or change?

Write the answers down and put them with next year's checklist. The next freeze is the best time to use what this one taught you, and the fastest way to forget it is to wait until October.

If your shop also does heating, our companion post on no-heat call triage covers the same problem from the HVAC side.

A freeze is a few bad days you can see coming. Do the prep now, and those days go a lot better for your techs and your customers. See how it works on the plumbing industry page.