The cold may be tough on our skin, but it's just as dangerous for our homes. Here's a few ways we can prevent plunging temperatures from becoming a plumbing disaster.

With highs well below freezing for the next week and beyond serious damage to your home's plumbing is a possibility. David Mapes is a fourth generation plumber and offers some simple tips to avoid a deep freeze.

"You need to get the pipes exposed to temperatures that are above freezing such as just the heat of the house. Just opening cabinet doors, opening the faucets to a trickle, just so that they can run, so that the moving water does not freeze."

Before the cold even settled into our area most of us made sure to detach our outdoor hoses and drain the water from the spicket, but if you neglected the task, trouble could be coming your way in the spring.

"An outside faucet, the water traps inside this pipe, and the cold can freeze back up inside there and here's an example of one where you actually have a broken pipe, but you're not going to realize it until in the spring when you're watering the lawn washing the car, the hose is going to work, but in the meantime it's flooding the inside of the house."

During the winter months if a drain does freeze, David actually says not to call a plumber since it's something that you can take care of yourself.

"Just use normal table salt, you know the morton's table salt. Pour some down the drain. It's going to concentrate into that water and eventually get down and finally break that frozen pipe loose."

You can also use other common household items to help thaw a freeze or just keep the water flowing. David suggests a hair dryer or use a fan to circulate warm air to help prevent a dangerous situation.

David recommends using special heating tape to prevent pipes from freezing along with space heaters. With those though you need to be careful because they're known to be a fire hazard.