What Should You Do With the Electrical Before Leaving a Second Home for the Winter?

Why the main stays on

A closed-up house in Ketchum or Fairfield in January is still working. A furnace or boiler needs electricity even when it burns propane or natural gas, because the controls, blowers and circulation pumps run on it. Heat cable on the roof and on pipes is electric. So are hard-wired smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, a sump pump, the router and whatever sensor is supposed to text you.

Shut off the main and all of that goes quiet together, with no alert. It is the same as a long outage, except nobody is working to restore it. The worry behind the habit is fair: nobody wants a failed appliance or a fire in an empty house. The answer to that is shutting off the specific things that do not need to run.

Leave the heat on, too. The American Red Cross advice for going away in cold weather is to leave the heat set no lower than 55 degrees. A setting is not a guarantee for a pipe in a cold outside wall, so ask your heating contractor or plumber what your house needs.

Go through the panel one circuit at a time

Start with the directory on the panel door. If the labels are blank, faded or say things like misc, that is the first job. An older Hailey or Bellevue house that has been added onto may have labels that stopped being true years ago. Turn off one breaker, walk the house, write down what stopped, and turn it back on. If you cannot tell what a breaker feeds, leave it on.

Two loads that need a plan, not a switch

The electric water heater is the one that gets expensive. If a plumber drains the tank, the breaker has to be off first and stay off until the tank is full again. One manufacturer's manual warns that powering a water heater before it is completely full can cause immediate element burnout. Tape a note to the breaker so whoever opens the house in spring does not switch it on first and fill it second.

A hot tub should not be left off with water in it. Water in the shell and plumbing can freeze. Many newer spas have a freeze protection setting, but it only works with power, so an outage can undo it. Your two real choices are to leave it running and have someone check on it, or to have it fully drained and winterized. Check the manual for your model, and if you will not be able to tell when it has lost power, lean toward winterizing.

A space heater is not freeze protection

People set one in a cold bathroom or by a crawl space hatch and leave for the season. Do not. The U.S. Fire Administration says to turn space heaters off when leaving the room or going to bed, and nobody is going to be in that room for the rest of the winter.

It also causes the problem it is meant to prevent. A 1,500-watt heater takes most of a 15-amp circuit, and if it trips the breaker, it may take other things on that circuit with it. See why breakers trip more in winter. If one part of the house will not hold temperature without help, that is a job for your heating contractor or a properly installed circuit.

Test what has to work while you are gone

An untested circuit is a guess, so test these on a day when you can still call someone:

• Heat cable. Turn it on and walk the run. The heat tape guide covers what to look for. The ground-fault breaker on that circuit has a test procedure of its own, and one cable maker's manual says to test it according to the breaker manufacturer's instructions.
• GFCI outlets. Press test and reset on the ones feeding a freezer, a sump pump or anything else that matters, then confirm the thing plugged in is running again.
• Smoke alarms. The U.S. Fire Administration says to test them monthly, replace the backup battery in a hard-wired alarm once a year, and replace the whole alarm 10 years from its manufacture date. Check the date on the back while you are up there.
• Standby generator. Confirm it is set to start on its own, the self-test is running, and the spot around it will stay reachable. The standby generator guide has more on placement in snow.
• Service mast. Stand outside and look up. If the mast leans or the bracing looks loose, or the roof above it sheds snow, deal with it now. Idaho Power owns the wires up to the drip loop. The mast, weatherhead and meter base are yours, and that is much easier to repair in November than after a slide in Sun Valley in March.

Plan for the outage you will not be there for

Idaho Power sends outage alerts automatically to the primary account holder. Log in to My Account and confirm your mobile number is current, then add your caretaker or property manager as a contact. They can be at the house in the time it takes you to find a flight.

Those alerts come from the utility, which is why they matter. A Wi-Fi freeze sensor depends on your router, and your router depends on the power that just went out, so the sensor can go silent at the moment you most need it. Keep it, and do not make it your only warning. Idaho Power's outage map also leaves off outages affecting fewer than 10 customers, so a quiet map does not prove the house has power.

Agree on a rule in advance for how long the power can be out before someone goes in. That depends on how the house is heated and how cold it is, so ask your heating contractor. What to do when the power goes out covers telling an Idaho Power outage from a problem in your own panel.

What to leave for your caretaker

Put this on one page, keep a copy at the panel, and send a copy to your caretaker's phone.

• A photo of the panel directory, with the breakers that must stay on marked.
• Where the main breaker is, and the instruction that it stays on.
• The rule for a tripped breaker: push it fully off, then back on, once. If it trips again, leave it off and call.
• What to check on each visit: the thermostat reading, the panel, the outdoor GFCIs and the heat cable controller.
• Your number, your electrician's number, and who decides what when you cannot be reached.

Ask to be told about any tripped breaker, even one that reset fine. A repeat trip in an empty house is worth tracking down before the next cold snap.