Being very cold

[Mortblanc]

(7 January 2018, 13:36)Lightspeed Wrote: Out of interest, my understanding was that you guys habitually deal with long periods of cold below 15C at your locations. Is it the further drop in temperature or the combination that cold with strong winds that is causing you so much pain at the moment?

CH and I live on about the same latitude line but I am a couple hundred miles east of him and he is a couple of thousand feet in elevation higher than myself.

That means we will often get almost the same temps but he will have some snow I do not get due to the precipitation patterns in the higher elevation.

Just for the record, in my area the average high temperature in January is 5-7c. That is high temp, nightly lows will average -5 or so with a dip to -10 not unusual.

Since Christmas Eve we have not been above 0, day or night. In all of last week we never got above -10c. Our night time lows have been hovering around -20c.

Wind chills at night have dropped below -35.

14 days without getting above zero at any time. And through all that we have had an 8-10mph wind alternating between the north and west coming right out of the coldest regions of the continent.

Now I have to say that we do this about once each year. It is not unusual, it is usually just unexpected due partly to our weather service.

They optimistically predict one or two nights of cold followed by a quick warm up like normal, then we get hit with a "bomb", which they knew was on the way and did not inform us about! They knew but it would ruin their happy little world of being the popular part of the nightly news to tell us we are about to get brutally smashed.

Temps go down and stay there and if it is early in the season some are caught unprepared. One of the real problems is that when something freezes during one of these events it is not going to thaw out and work again for weeks!

In my area this one did not cause a lot of power outages due to lack of ice and snow. We were just beset with deep, saturating, windblown inescapable cold.

This week my temps are expected to rise to "normal". Back to about 15c. Of course they are promoting this as a warm-up, when it is actually a return to normal January temperatures. The media once again changes the vocabulary to meet their needs.

One thing this event did do, it prompted me to do some general maintenance work I had not planned. I had been well set for "normal", or even "extreme normal" with snow and such for a couple of days. I found myself a bit short on the preps for an antarctic expedition that would last a fortnight.

These temps will draw attention to any weakness in ones system.

Little things caused sudden problems. I had not straightened the drain line as I should have, I had replaced a threshold and forgotten to replace the sweep to seal out the air, a new AC unit caused problems when I tried to winter proof it and allowed cold air in.

Nothing like walking past a window you know you sealed and feeling a blast of cold air, or standing in front of a door and feeling air come all around the sides and under the bottom when you know you installed the kit to seal it up. The constant wind chill forced air into cracks that have not given me problems in the past.

All these little things caused more problem than one would realize. Between the cracks I had created during summer jobs and such I had air flow coming in equal to throwing open a window at -25c.

Right now I an sitting here and outside temp is -5c. I have only one space heater on at the moment and it is on low and keeping the entire house at 25c.

The remainder of the winter should be a snap.