Service
Extreme Cold Check
It is −33 °C in Calgary, your house is empty, and you cannot stop thinking about it.
This is the check people actually lose sleep over, and it is booked during rather than after the event. When Calgary drops into a multi-day deep cold, the failure mode is specific and fast: a furnace lockout, a failed igniter, a plugged intake or exhaust, or a tripped breaker, followed by a house cooling toward the point where supply lines in exterior walls begin to freeze.
The visit records interior temperature in several locations, whether the furnace is running and producing heat, thermostat setting and behaviour, condition at known cold spots such as garages, basements, bathrooms on exterior walls and rooms above unheated spaces, visible frost or condensation on windows and fixtures, and whether the water shut-off state matches your instructions.
If heat has actually failed, the value of the visit is entirely in what happens next: documenting it, reaching you quickly, and getting a licensed HVAC technician to the property. VacantHomes attends and coordinates — it does not perform gas or heating work.
Common questions
At what temperature do pipes freeze?
Water freezes at 0 °C, but pipes inside a building do not freeze the moment the air outside hits that figure. What matters is the temperature at the pipe, which depends on where it runs, how well that space is insulated, how long the cold persists, and whether wind is driving heat out of the assembly.
A pipe in a heated interior wall may be fine at −30 °C outside. A pipe in an uninsulated exterior wall, an unheated garage, or a crawlspace can freeze with the interior at a nominally reasonable temperature, because the pipe is not experiencing the interior temperature.
The commonly cited threshold for concern is a sustained outdoor temperature below about −6 °C, with risk rising sharply as temperature drops and duration extends. Wind matters a great deal — it accelerates heat loss from the building envelope.
The practical approach is to identify the vulnerable locations in your specific property rather than watching a single number: exterior walls with plumbing, unheated garages, basements with poor insulation, rooms above unheated spaces, and anywhere with a history of freezing. Those are the places a visit should check.
What happens if my furnace fails while I am away?
The building starts cooling at a rate determined by its insulation, air sealing, the outdoor temperature and the wind. A well-built modern house in moderate cold may lose only a few degrees a day. An older house during a −30 °C wind event can approach freezing internally within a day or two.
The consequence is not a cold house — it is frozen plumbing. Once interior temperatures at vulnerable locations reach freezing, supply lines begin to freeze, and the failure typically shows itself when the ice thaws and water starts running.
This is why visit frequency during cold events matters more than visit frequency generally. The difference between finding a heating failure after two days and after two weeks is the difference between a service call and a restoration project.
On a monitored property the sequence is: the failure is found on a visit, documented, you are contacted, and a licensed HVAC contractor is dispatched under whatever authorisation you have set in advance. Setting that authorisation before you leave is what allows it to happen at 8 PM on a Sunday rather than after an email exchange across time zones.
Connected temperature sensors can shorten detection further and are a sensible supplement — though they only tell you something is wrong, and somebody still has to go to the property.
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