A plumber's freeze season and Thanksgiving checklist

The equinox is this week. In the northern states the first hard freeze is somewhere between a few weeks and two months off, and Thanksgiving is nine weeks from Thursday. For a plumbing company those are the two most predictable surges of the year, and both arrive at the worst possible hours: overnight, on weekends and on a holiday.

Everything that decides who gets those calls can be set up in October. Almost none of it can be fixed once the phones are already ringing.

Freeze calls are certain, only the date is not

The scale of a winter is easy to underestimate from inside one service area. State Farm’s frozen pipe figures, released in January, counted more than 20,000 frozen pipe and winter water claims from 2024 through June 2025, with over $628 million paid and an average payment above $30,000. The five states with the highest total paid were Illinois, Oregon, Washington, Texas and Tennessee.

Two of those five are not places most people picture when they think of frozen pipes. NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster list puts the February 2021 winter storm and cold wave across the Northwest, Central and Eastern states at $27.2 billion, adjusted for inflation. The South freezes rarely, and when it does, the plumbers there are booked solid.

A few more figures explain why the homeowner calling you is in such a hurry:

• State Farm says uninsulated pipes are most at risk once temperatures drop below 20°F, and that a small crack can release more than 250 gallons a day.
• The Insurance Information Institute, using ISO data, puts the average homeowners claim for water damage and freezing at $15,400 over 2019 to 2023.
• The same tables show water damage and freezing made up 22.6% of homeowners insurance losses in 2023.

The person on the phone is looking at a ceiling stain, an insurance claim and a bill bigger than your invoice. They want someone licensed, nearby and answering. When thawing a pipe fails, the Red Cross frozen pipe guidance gives exactly that instruction: call a licensed plumber.

Before the first freeze: the profile and the pages

Most of this is an afternoon of work, done once:

• A frozen pipe page. What to do before you arrive (find the main shut-off, keep the faucet open, never thaw a pipe with an open flame), which pipes freeze first, and how fast you can get there. The Red Cross list is a good spine: outdoor hose bibs, pool and sprinkler supply lines, pipes in basements, crawl spaces, attics, garages and kitchen cabinets, and pipes against outside walls.
• Holiday hours set now. Put Thanksgiving, the day after and the December holidays into your Google Business Profile weeks ahead, along with your emergency availability. A profile that says “closed” on the Friday after Thanksgiving when you are actually on call is handing the job away.
• The license number, everywhere it is required. In Texas that is the Responsible Master Plumber’s number on every ad and on both sides of every truck. In a freeze, a homeowner who has never hired a plumber is checking.
• Offers that are still true. The federal tax credit for water heaters and heat pumps covered improvements made through December 31, 2025. Any winter water heater promotion that still mentions it is wrong.
• Ad schedules that match the on-call rota. If your Local Services Ads account has already moved into Google Ads, the ad schedule now lives in the campaign settings there. Check it against who is actually carrying the phone.

Brown Friday is real, and it is in the data

Roto-Rooter calls the Friday after Thanksgiving “Brown Friday” and says it is the busiest day of its year. By its own figures, calls that day run 50 percent above an average Friday, and the four-day weekend runs 21 percent above any other Thursday to Sunday stretch. It is one company’s data, but the shape will be familiar to anyone who has worked that weekend.

The order of the jobs is useful too. Roto-Rooter ranks the Thanksgiving clogs as kitchen sinks and jammed garbage disposals first, main sewer lines second and toilets third. Grease, rice, poultry bones and a house full of overnight guests do the rest, often on a drain that was already partly blocked, and sometimes on a sewer line that tree roots have been working into for years.

Three things follow for marketing:

1. Do not pause the ads for the holiday. Pause them only for hours nobody can answer.
2. Send past customers a short pre-holiday note in mid-November: what not to put down the disposal, and your holiday number. It is useful, it gets saved, and it puts your name on the fridge before the clog.
3. Offer sewer camera inspections in early November to customers with a history of root problems. The ones who book avoid a backup with a full house.

Decide who answers before the first cold night

Invoca’s 2026 home services report found plumbing companies answered 74% of calls with a person, the best of any home services trade it measured, which still leaves about one call in four unanswered, and a freeze night is when every line rings at once. On a night when water is coming through a ceiling, few callers will wait to try you again.

There are three workable answers: an on-call rotation that is written down, an answering service that can actually book, or an AI voice agent that answers, asks the right questions, books the job and texts the plumber on call. Invoca’s own advice is to pause paid campaigns for hours when nobody can dispatch or book, unless an AI agent is handling those calls. Pick one now and test it with a real call at 10 p.m.

What to do this month

• Write the on-call rotation for Thanksgiving week and for the first forecast freeze, with names.
• Enter holiday hours on your Google profile for Thanksgiving, the Friday after and late December.
• Publish or refresh the frozen pipe page, and add a short page on holiday drain trouble.
• Schedule a winterizing text to past customers for mid-October: drain sprinkler lines, close the inside valves feeding outdoor hose bibs, as the Red Cross advises.
• Remove any line that still offers the water heater tax credit.
• Call your own number after hours and listen to what a customer hears.

The full picture of how we plan a plumbing company’s year, freeze to freeze, is on our plumbing marketing page.