Dang it's cold now....

[Big Frank]

It's STILL really cold and feels like -10, even though it's just above 0. I just checked the Accuweather forecast and it said 65% chance of snow today. I haven't plowed my driveway or sidewalk all winter and thought I better do it tomorrow after it's done snowing. Then I checked to see how much snow we're supposed to get. Only 1/8 of an inch all day, 0.06" in the morning and another 0.06" in the afternoon. So, there's no need to wait until it's over to plow. I wanted to do it yesterday, but not as bad as I wanted to go to bed after my package from Amazon got here. It was a little bit of work dragging the wheelie bins through the snow out to the street Monday night, and they're still out there.

Saturday I finally remembered to start up my ATV and let the engine run to charge the battery up. When I turned the key on it lit up it said 11.5 volts. Uh-oh! The lithium battery usually shows an overcharge of 14 volts or so, more than a lead-acid battery, but it's been too long since I ran it. I turned the key and it went rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr and I let go. Then I turned the key again and it fired right up. The NOCO lithium battery is so awesome it has a built-in "jump-start" reserve capacity. And if you have a parasitic drain, like the computer that runs the EFI and everything, it will kill the voltage before it drains the battery. I was going to let it run 20 minutes, I always run it 15-20 minutes when I start it, but I forgot about it. With the door shut I couldn't hear the thing running from my chair 30+ feet away. So it ran for 45 minutes before I remembered and turned it off. The gas in it is winterized with Sta-Bil and Seafoam, but not the gas cans in my shed. I need to pump that gas into the car and use it up, but it's been so cold all winter I haven't wanted to deal with it.

[MikeBjerum]

Sorry about your garage. 

My wife has been telling me about a whole lot of horse barns that have failed (she does faceybookey about horses).  Snow load is a killer.

In parts of the country, they engineer with snow load in mind. The sad part is that it isn't uniform, so areas that are now getting more snow weren't engineered for those loads when the barns were build.

[Big Frank]

I still remember when we were kids, there was so much snow by my uncles' barn in the U.P. my older brother jumped off the roof of barn into the snow. It snow packed between his legs stopped him, but his feet never hit the ground. There was a 14' drift in the trees on the side of the barnyard too. They built with snow in mind back then in northern Michigan. In the Soo, they run out of places to plow the snow to, so they fill dump trucks and take the snow somewhere else to get rid of it. It's funny when you see a front end loader in a store parking lot putting a mound of snow in a dump truck. I probably have 5" of snow here because it's been piling up all winter and way too cold to melt much of it.

[Rastus]

In parts of the country, they engineer with snow load in mind. The sad part is that it isn't uniform, so areas that are now getting more snow weren't engineered for those loads when the barns were build.

So my wife was concerned I was spending too much money on the new barn when I put a decent pitch on it, beefed up the roofing and put in snow tracks (thanks to Tab) to prevent getting my gutters ripped off by a slide. 

[Big Frank]

I've seen A-frame houses that are supposed to handle snow really well because the roof is too steep for snow to stick to it. I know garages can be built that way too, and I used to walk by an A-frame church a lot when I was in high school. But the last couple of days I've been wondering if A-frames can be scaled up to bigger buildings like barns. If not, a steep hip roof would work, but either way you're losing a lot of room inside compared to typical barns.

The roof of my house is steep and looks like a 12/12 or 10/12 pitch. And the house is square, so the roof is shaped like a pyramid, except for a flat spot on top. It may be 2' square but I think it's smaller than that. That's the only place snow could build up if the wind didn't always blow it off, and I don't think a good shovel full has ever built up. That's one of the few good things about this house. It might collapse some day, but not because of the weight of snow on the roof.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

I went out before dark and plowed until after dark, two hours I think, but it seemed a lot longer. I plowed my driveway and sidewalk, and the driveway next door too. Just as I was making what I planned on being the last pass, my plow broke. I sheared off the angle-adjustment locking pin on the plow frame. The blade can pivot a 2 positions to the left and 2 to the right, or be straight like I use it most of the time. The blue handle in the picture raises the pin and a spring pulls it down into one of the holes in the square bar. The square bar is on the left side of the blade and extends out and back in the corresponding black square tube to adjust the angle in one of five positions. I mean, it used to. Now the blade can flop around from left to right with nothing holding it at any particular angle. I finally realized it's the same double-ended shear pin I broke before and flipped over to use again. It's a good thing I bought a spare when that happened. When I put the new pin in I'll be ready to break it 2 more times.   I was shaving tree roots that were growing under the broken paving stones I moved in the fall. I kept hitting something back there by the snow pile that I don't know what it was. There shouldn't have been any roots over there.

When I was plowing, the fingers on my right hand were hurting the whole time. I chalked it up to my carpal tunnel syndrome being so bad in that hand. Eventually the fingers on my left hand started hurting from the cold. By the time I came in and took my gloves off to look, I had several fingers turning purple, but not black. Not quite, but my right thumb and index finger weren't far from it. The throttle is operated by thumb pressure only and it hurts a lot and goes numb from carpal tunnel syndrome when I ride. If I didn't have power steering I don't think I could ride anymore. I ran warm water in the bathroom sink and stuck my hands under it. You can guess how bad that hurt. Then I put some warm water in a dishpan and set it on my desk to soak my hands. It didn't take long at all before they were back to normal. Or abnormal in my case. It just changed from -10 to -11, but at least it doesn't feel any colder than the actual temperature.

[alfsauve]

Kiss Kitty, ever the worrier, asked how would we keep out home warm during a power outage.  I explained that as long as we had natural gas we could heat ceramics on the stove and use the battery/inverter to run fans.  We wouldn't need to run the frig/freezers as we could just put the stuff outside.  She being of bright mind ask that if we had natural gas why couldn't we continue to run the furnace?   I told her we'd still need electricity to run the blower and control board.  She gives me one of these "SO" looks and ask then why not hook up my battery/inverter to the furnace?

Hmm.  I did some checking.  In the past I had noted that the furnace wouldn't run in "heat" mode unless the compressors were powered with 240Vac, EVEN though I was using gas heat and had turned off the Heat Pump Mode.  But we have newer, more advanced systems now.  (No heat pump option anymore, because you can only get the GA Power rebate one time).  Will the furnace run without the 240V to the compressors?  Yes.  Next step.  How much power does the furnace actually use.  Yeah, yeah, they're spec'd at 15Amps but  they don't run continuously, and with all the new soft start, energy saving electronics it probably doesn't come close to 200W when it run.  It's hardwired but easy to get to, so I'm going insert a monitor in the circuit.

On the "okay you can buy some toys" front.  She's approved buying a commercially made battery backup unit just to have for the furnace.  I'm thinking of a Jackery 3600, but I'll wait on the power measurement first.   

Before you ask.  Other than a flicker now and then power outages on GA Power's grid are rare, and our whole subdivision uses underground utilities.  There's less than a 1/4mile expose HV lines between the substation and our SD.  But who am I to argue with getting a new toy.

[PegLeg45]

16° for the low Sunday morning and the adjusted for wind chill temps are to be around the 3° mark...... We lived in the NC mountains fifty years ago and this was semi normal for extended periods..... I AIN'T built for this crap NOW.

[Rastus]

The Jackery would certainly have some convenience after you set up an input point on the unit.  I bet you can find that you can design and run your own solar for less with more capability.  Victron makes some very reliable pure sine wave units that fail over to battery like a UPS backup.  They have the charger/inverter models or you can go with separate charger and inverter and most of the chargers can be hooked up to a generator to charge/maintain the battery for extended use.

[Big Frank]

Most of our power "failures" are just a blink, long enough to see the lights flicker, and all the digital clocks to go to 12:00. And that's with all above ground power lines, and wind and ice storms knocking down tree branches (and trees) every winter. Most of the time it's a car hitting a pole or a critter on a transformer, and the automatic transfer reclosers (ATRs), giant circuit breakers, reroute power around the problem. In the 35 years I've been in this house I remember losing power all day once. It may have been a longer than a day, or even less, but I only remember it going out for more than 2 or 3 hours one time. And the times it did go out for a couple of hours were SEVERAL years apart on average. Once or twice per decade I'll lose power while they replace a line, but that usually only happens if the problem is in my neighborhood. Whenever there's a ice storm in the forecast, they start bringing in utility workers from some nearby states to deal with it before it even hits.

P.S. It hit -5 actual and "feels like" temperature while I was typing this. It's only supposed to get up to 22 degrees today.   That makes me not want to go out and work on the plow, but I'll 93.6% certainly go to the store.