Closing an Okanagan house for the winter, properly.

The one hazard that matters

Everything else on this page is housekeeping. The thing that turns a quiet winter into a six-figure restoration is water, released inside a heated envelope that nobody is standing in. A supply line lets go, a valve on a toilet weeps, a hot water tank splits, a sprinkler line that was never fully blown out freezes and cracks at the riser. None of it announces itself. It simply runs, for as long as nobody is there.

The Okanagan makes this worse in a specific way: our winters are mild enough that owners feel safe leaving the heat low, and cold enough for a week in January to take a garage line or an exterior wall run below freezing. A house that has been fine for four winters is not evidence about the fifth.

Step one, before anything physical: read the clause

Do this first, because it determines what the rest of the shutdown has to look like. Almost every Canadian policy suspends water damage cover once a dwelling is unoccupied past a stated number of days in the heating season, unless you keep the heat on and have the house checked at a set interval, or shut the water off and drain the system, or fit a monitored alarm. The trigger is as low as four days at some insurers.

The full breakdown, insurer by insurer, and how to find the paragraph in your own wording in about four minutes, is here. Do not leave without knowing which of the three options your policy accepts, and without an email from your broker confirming it.

The shutdown sequence

Water, in this order

• Irrigation blown out and the backflow drained. Not just shut off. Water left in a manifold or a backflow assembly is the single most common spring surprise, and the repair is trivial in November and a wall opening in April.
• Exterior bibs isolated and drained, including anything feeding a dock, an outdoor kitchen, a pool fill or a hot tub top-up line.
• Decide on the main. If you are going the shut-and-drain route, shut it and drain the system properly, including fixtures, appliance lines and the hot water tank. Half of this is worse than none of it: water sitting behind a closed valve still freezes and still splits the pipe.
• If you are leaving the water on, which is normal for a home with regular attendance and monitoring, fit an automatic shutoff at the main and know where the manual valve is. Write down where it is for whoever attends. In a large custom home nobody finds it in the dark.
• Traps. Rarely used fixtures, floor drains, guest baths and the drain under a basement bar all evaporate dry over four months and let sewer gas in. Either have them run periodically or dose them.

Heat and envelope

• Set the temperature, do not set it low. Twelve to fifteen degrees is the usual sensible band. Chasing the last few dollars of gas is what freezes the line in the exterior wall of the bonus room above the garage.
• Leave interior doors open and vanity cabinets ajar on exterior walls, so heat reaches the plumbing rather than the middle of the room.
• Garage. Every winter loss we have ever seen in this valley involved a garage: an uninsulated line, a hose bib, a fridge or a freezer plumbed for ice. Treat the garage as the outdoors it actually is.
• Roof, valleys and gutters cleared before you go. A blocked gutter in a mild-freeze climate is an ice dam waiting for the right week, and an ice dam pushes water backwards under the shingle and into the ceiling below.
• Attic and crawlspace looked at, once, before the house goes quiet. This is the part almost nobody does and the part where a builder earns the fee.

Power, appliances, and the small stuff

• Confirm the generator or battery backup actually starts, and that the sump has power on the backup circuit.
• Unplug what does not need to be live. Leave the fridge running only if somebody is attending; a fridge that fails in December is found in March.
• Change the furnace filter and confirm the HRV is set for an unoccupied house rather than a full one.
• Wine room, aquarium, humidor, plants, anything with its own environment: name who is responsible for it in writing.
• Photograph the meters and the mechanical room on the day you leave. It is a five-minute job that settles arguments later.

Security and appearance

• Mail and parcel holds, and someone to clear what still arrives.
• Snow cleared from the drive whether or not anyone is home. An uncleared drive in January is a sign in the yard reading empty.
• Lights on varied timers, blinds left as they normally sit, and tracks in the snow. Occupancy is a look, and it is worth maintaining.
• Nothing on social media about the length of the trip until you are home.

Who attends the house

The list above is the easy half. The hard half is that a shutdown is a snapshot and a winter is four months. Something has to attend the house between November and April, and the honest options are these:

1. Nobody, with the water off and the system drained. Legitimate, cheap, and accepted by most insurers. The cost is that you come back to a dead house and a spring startup, and anything else that goes wrong runs unnoticed for four months.
2. A monitored alarm, and nobody. Satisfies most wordings on its own. You will know the mechanical room is at three degrees. You will be in Palm Springs.
3. A neighbour or family member with a key. Free, well-intentioned, and unable to produce the record an insurer asks for. It also puts a friendship in the path of a bad night.
4. A watch service on an interval. Produces a record. What happens after the record varies enormously between operators, so ask the eleven questions before you sign.
5. Monitoring plus somebody competent who attends and can act. The alarm answers the insurer, and a person answers the alarm. This is what Brasskey is.

Questions owners ask us