The extreme cold could spell disaster for your home if it's not properly prepared.

And various agencies and officials around the Triangle are offering advice to homeowners to make sure they are ready for the cold snap.  Among them, firefighters and plumbers.

In a Brier Creek neighborhood, plumber Eric Brown was busy checking out a home for things that could cause problems during the freeze.

Spying a hose attached to a faucet, he told NBC-17, “This is a winter no-no. We need to remove this hose from its spigot.”

Brown said the water inside the hose could freeze, and because ice expands, that block of ice in the hose could back its way up into the faucet.

“That will cause the spigot to freeze and you won't know notice it until springtime when you try to use the water and it floods the walls inside the home," he said.

When the weather gets cold, Brown says his firm, Schwartz Plumbing, gets a lot of a certain type of call.

“Mainly we see water heaters bursting because the water coming into homes is a lot colder,” he said.  “And because it’s going into a warm unit, that fluctuation in temperature will cause a weak heater to crack.”

Firefighters are another group of people who get busy when the weather turns frigid.

“Electrical fires are among our top 5 for causes of fire in the city of Raleigh,” said Fire Marshall Ronald Campbell.

Space heaters are one of the big reasons why power cords get overloaded.

Coleman says you need to keep a 3-foot radius around one of them so it won’t ignite furniture, curtains or anything else that is combustible.

But electric space heaters aren’t the only problem. He says people will fill kerosene heaters with gasoline or camper fuel; a big mistake. He says those fuels are much too volatile to use in kerosene heater.

And then there's the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning from using grills and charcoal to heat their homes.

The problem with that is they produce carbon monoxide, which is a toxic gas that you can't see, taste or smell.

Officials also advise you to nshut off all supplementary heating devices when you go to bed and instead use a couple of extra blankets if you're cold.

Related Links

1. Precision Weather