At the 2020 census Laconia had 10,275 housing units and 26.5% of them sat vacant. That’s the other city — cottages at the Weirs, camps along Paugus Bay, places on Opechee that close up in October and open in May. We drain them, blow the lines out with air, treat the traps, and hand you one written page saying what we shut and where it is.
Weirs Beach has been its own thing since before the city owned the water. Laconia bought two separate companies in 1955 — the Laconia Water Company and the Winni Water Company, which served the Weirs — and the Weirs still has its own facility and booster stations in the system today. Practically, that means a Weirs cottage can be on perfectly good city water and still sit on a street where nothing is heated from November to April.
The cottages are the issue, not the water. Most were built to be lived in from Memorial Day to Columbus Day: uninsulated crawlspaces, supply lines run under floors and through knee walls, a water heater in an unheated back room sitting full all winter. None of that is a defect. That’s what a camp is. It only turns into an opened ceiling and a repiped wall when somebody assumes the place got drained and nobody actually did it.
A lot of these places have also changed hands lately, or gone into summer rental, which means the person responsible for closing it up isn’t the person who closed it for the last thirty years. We get a fair number of October calls that open with “I think there’s a valve in the crawlspace?” There usually is. We’ll find it, and then we’ll write down where it is.
Photograph your crawlspace valves before you close the place up, flashlight on, and text the pictures to whoever might have to go in there in January. Doesn’t matter if that person is you — in January you won’t remember either.
Gravity gets most of the water out of a camp. It does not get water out of a horizontal run under a floor, a trap arm behind a tub, or the dishwasher and washing-machine lines — and those are exactly what splits. So we isolate and drain the system, then put air through it until every fixture runs dry, pull the water heater down and drain it, treat the traps with antifreeze rated for plumbing, and deal with whatever this particular building happens to have: a filter housing, a softener to bypass and drain, an irrigation zone, an outdoor shower, a line out to a boathouse.
Then it gets written down. What was shut, what was drained, where each valve is, what is left pressurized if anything, and what has to happen in the spring and in what order. One page. It belongs with the house, not with us. If you sell the place or hand it to a property manager, that page is worth more than our phone number.
Spring startup is the half people skip, and it’s the half that catches the damage. Opening a camp isn’t turning the water on — it’s turning it on slowly with somebody standing inside the building listening, because a line that split in February gives no sign of it until there’s pressure behind it. Most owners book the pair together.
A single-bathroom Laconia camp or cottage is $400. Two or more bathrooms starts at $1,000. A large lake place carrying the whole list — filters, softener, irrigation, boathouse — gets quoted per property, because there is simply more to drain. Spring startup is priced below the shutdown, and most people book the two at once.
Not in a camp. Draining clears the vertical runs and leaves water sitting in every horizontal one — under floors, behind tubs, in appliance lines. That trapped water is what freezes and splits the pipe. Air is what gets it out, which is why a proper shutdown costs more than opening a few faucets and why it works.
It changes where we start, not whether you need it. On city water there’s a curb stop and an interior valve to work from instead of a well pump and pressure tank. Everything downstream of that valve is identical: the building is unheated, and the water in those lines still has to come out.
Most years we’re closing places from late September through the first week of November, and the honest answer is that the first hard freeze doesn’t consult your calendar. If the building will be empty and unheated, earlier is better than clever. Nobody has ever regretted winterizing two weeks early.
Read your own policy, but NH homeowner policies typically require you either to keep a vacant home at a minimum temperature — commonly 55°F — or to shut the water supply off. The NH Insurance Department covers this. Worth knowing too: coverage is generally for the water damage, not for the pipe that broke.
Whoever is physically closest to the building in January. Give a copy to your property manager, your caretaker, and the neighbor who plows, and keep one in the house itself. A sheet that only exists in your email doesn’t help the person standing in a cold crawlspace with a flashlight.
Tell us what’s happening and we’ll give you a straight answer — what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there.
Describe what’s happening and where the property is. We’ll come back with a straight answer on what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there. If it’s an emergency, say so in the first line.
We reply to every request within 2 business hours.
