Frozen forced hot water zone

Hi everybody…

It seems likely that I have a frozen zone in my 250 year-old salt box house.

During a deep freeze a few years ago that zone froze as well, and I had a burst pipe that was fortunately fixed under my homeowners insurance.

This likely occurred because of a failed thermostat wire, which may have been chewed by a mouse. I haven’t been able to correct that, since the wire runs through walls and I can’t get the thing out. I do have a plan to run a new wire outside along the side of the outside wall and back in through a cable TV conduit and up to the thermostat, but I managed not getting this done for all last winter by leaving that particular zone and room as a barely heated unused space.

The singular room that this zone heats is adjacent to the main living area that is heated by a woodstove. At night, I simply leave the door open, and the room usually stays somewhere in the high 30s°F. Last year the pipes did not freeze. I thought I was good.

Suddenly, even after a few days that weren’t that cold, I can get no water flowing through those pipes when I do my usual cold snap emergency measure of manually opening that zone by lowering the plunger on the Taco zone valve.

But this time around, no water is circulating.

With the help of AI, it seems that it is strongly likely that there is a frozen section of the pipe in that room. Likely where the pipe goes through a small inaccessible portion between the original foundation and this add-on room.

I asked AI if it would be a reasonable thought to just leave the pipe frozen until it thaws naturally, since there may not be any other easy way to bring it above freezing, and it said it was a reasonable idea, and that the risk of it bursting again might be low.

Last night I had what I thought was a pretty good idea of how to prevent this from happening again, but I won’t be able to do that until the pipes thaw. I thought maybe I would put a temporary short wire to a thermostat that I will leave in the basement, near the boiler, and just have the temperature set to a degree or so above what the basement is, so anytime the thermostat falls below that temperature the zone would open and allow water to go through that zone to prevent it from freezing moving forward until I get the wire situation sorted out in the other room. May not be a great solution. Maybe you can suggest alternatives?

So… Do you think I should just leave this room unheated for the rest of the winter? Maybe I could empty the rest of the water out of that zone to lower the pressure for when the thing does start to thaw? Not really sure how to bleed the system when it’s back up and running though.

I really have zero cash for a service call, so I pretty much have to figure out how to do this on my own. If it bursts, I hope my homeowner insurance would cover it. I’ve been dealing with this kind of crap for years. They may just throw their hands up in the air and say figure out a better plan moving forward.

What do you think?