That's just what I have been thinking. But in the Fred era he deemed the cost to be prohibitive. Nevertheless he must have had something in mind, not just that the pipes he got installed would never be used.

Perhaps we could get it done gradually in terms of several boilers being needed. Start with a boiler for the pipes in the most vulnerable part of the pitch. I am no physicist but presumably the heat from one boiler spreads to all the pipes but is substantially better near to its individual boiler.

Maybe nowadays it is possible to hire a boiler on a truck just for the duration of the forecasted low temperatures leading up to a match.

The counter-argument to all this would be :-
In the most icy, windy and snow-bound conditions would we want to stage a match that nay b­ugger would venture out to watch (in normal times)?

But overall there can be times when getting the fixture played is more important than the immediate financial loss involved in taking extraordinary measures to get it played. Such is now the case.