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It's always in the cold when things break
The power went out yesterday evening, with the outside temperature at -27F (that's -33C). It was, for awhile, cozy and quiet - we read for awhile by an LED lantern (while the dog paced anxiously because Things Are Terrible and Why Are The Humans Doing Nothing) and then decided it might be a good idea to take a drive and find out if it was just us. Since our neighbor died a few years back, we're the only ones on our road, which means it would be good to know if we should call it in or if it was the whole area.
But it was the whole area -- the whole valley, the whole north of town. Eerie to see everything completely and totally dark, the roadsides and the hills. We drove down to the crossroads a mile from us, where normally there's an all-night gas station and a weigh station and some street lights, now just pitch blackness, and turned around to come back. Presumably they knew about it and were working as hard as they could to get it back on, with that many people out of power in these bitterly cold temperatures.
Meanwhile the temperature in the house was dropping, from 70 to 63 in about 2 hours, so we discussed emergency heating solutions. There are only two things in the entire system that need power to keep the house warm: the electrical parts on the boiler (which is oil fueled, but needs electricity to start up), and the pump that circulates hot water in the house. Orion already has a battery backup for the pump; it's just a large car battery in the crawl space that can run it for a few hours if need be (in theory; we've never tried it). The boiler is harder, and it's outside. We didn't previously have a battery backup for the boiler because it ran on coal and was (almost) completely non-electric. Last summer we switched to an oil heater which is VASTLY better in EVERY way (no more buckets of coal! no more filth and mess! no more having to go outside 5 times a day in -40 weather and get up in the middle of the night to feed it!) ... but it needs electricity to run.
We have a very old car with no functional heater and really, no functional anything, but the engine still runs, and last fall Orion parked it near the boiler in the thought that we could run the boiler off the car's alternator. The problem we hadn't thought of until last night is that there is no way we would be able to start a cold car at -27. Nothing will start in this weather if it doesn't have its engine block/battery heater plugged in for awhile first ... which you can't do with no electricity! Orion said he thinks he can warm it up with a flamethrower (this is what I'm married to, I'm just saying), but his flamethrower is not currently working because he used up all the propane in his portable propane tank trying to set a pile of wet brush on fire last fall.
#alaskaproblems
One reason, in fact, why I wanted to drive around in the Subaru a little bit before bed was to start it up and warm it up so we would still be able to start it later if we needed to. There's no way it would start after being outside all night, but we set the alarm for 3 a.m. because it should still start after about 4 hours (that's probably getting close to the top of how long you can leave a car outside at 30 below and still be able to get it started), so we could run it again and (Orion thinks) use alligator clips to hook the battery into the boiler's electrical system.
... but we didn't have to, because the power clicked on about an hour later. Go GVEA! \o/ (Golden Valley Electric; Fairbanks is isolated enough that it has its own local power plant and utility company.) In about 3.5 hours the temperature had fallen to around 60 in the house, so it wasn't even really that uncomfortable; we had just gone to bed.
But it did really drive home how quickly you lose heat at -30. I mean, we were never in any sort of danger; even if our car-based emergency heating solution failed, we could easily have driven to town and gotten warm, as long as we were vigilant about not leaving the car un-run for so long that it wouldn't start. (There's also a car in the garage, and theoretically you can still open the garage door by hand without power, but again, we're not completely confident about that, especially since the garage door has a tendency to freeze shut in this weather.) The gas cookstove still works without power (though you need to hand-light the burners) and we usually keep a filled 5-gallon can of water on hand, since there's no way to get water into the house without power to run the well pump and we've had outages as long as 8-12 hours before. But never when it was this cold; this would have been basically the worst-case scenario if it'd lasted overnight or longer.
Technically we have an emergency generator -- new, in the box, in the attic. But generators come with their own set of problems: once they're set up, they have to have gas and oil in them (and you can't just leave that sitting around for years or it won't work when you need it to), they need to be kept dry and warm enough to start up, etc. A generator that'd been sitting outside at -27 would have been as hard to start as the car. We talked about maybe building a generator shed next summer and getting the whole thing set up and wired in. So far, in the going-on-15 years we've lived out here, we have never had a power outage long enough that we'd have needed it. But last night would have been, if it'd lasted a few hours longer. So. It does get you thinking. A lot of people have wood stoves, not as their main source of heat but as a backup, for precisely this reason.
So that was our little adventure. And this morning it's still -24. Bleh. But at least there's power and the house is warm.
But it was the whole area -- the whole valley, the whole north of town. Eerie to see everything completely and totally dark, the roadsides and the hills. We drove down to the crossroads a mile from us, where normally there's an all-night gas station and a weigh station and some street lights, now just pitch blackness, and turned around to come back. Presumably they knew about it and were working as hard as they could to get it back on, with that many people out of power in these bitterly cold temperatures.
Meanwhile the temperature in the house was dropping, from 70 to 63 in about 2 hours, so we discussed emergency heating solutions. There are only two things in the entire system that need power to keep the house warm: the electrical parts on the boiler (which is oil fueled, but needs electricity to start up), and the pump that circulates hot water in the house. Orion already has a battery backup for the pump; it's just a large car battery in the crawl space that can run it for a few hours if need be (in theory; we've never tried it). The boiler is harder, and it's outside. We didn't previously have a battery backup for the boiler because it ran on coal and was (almost) completely non-electric. Last summer we switched to an oil heater which is VASTLY better in EVERY way (no more buckets of coal! no more filth and mess! no more having to go outside 5 times a day in -40 weather and get up in the middle of the night to feed it!) ... but it needs electricity to run.
We have a very old car with no functional heater and really, no functional anything, but the engine still runs, and last fall Orion parked it near the boiler in the thought that we could run the boiler off the car's alternator. The problem we hadn't thought of until last night is that there is no way we would be able to start a cold car at -27. Nothing will start in this weather if it doesn't have its engine block/battery heater plugged in for awhile first ... which you can't do with no electricity! Orion said he thinks he can warm it up with a flamethrower (this is what I'm married to, I'm just saying), but his flamethrower is not currently working because he used up all the propane in his portable propane tank trying to set a pile of wet brush on fire last fall.
#alaskaproblems
One reason, in fact, why I wanted to drive around in the Subaru a little bit before bed was to start it up and warm it up so we would still be able to start it later if we needed to. There's no way it would start after being outside all night, but we set the alarm for 3 a.m. because it should still start after about 4 hours (that's probably getting close to the top of how long you can leave a car outside at 30 below and still be able to get it started), so we could run it again and (Orion thinks) use alligator clips to hook the battery into the boiler's electrical system.
... but we didn't have to, because the power clicked on about an hour later. Go GVEA! \o/ (Golden Valley Electric; Fairbanks is isolated enough that it has its own local power plant and utility company.) In about 3.5 hours the temperature had fallen to around 60 in the house, so it wasn't even really that uncomfortable; we had just gone to bed.
But it did really drive home how quickly you lose heat at -30. I mean, we were never in any sort of danger; even if our car-based emergency heating solution failed, we could easily have driven to town and gotten warm, as long as we were vigilant about not leaving the car un-run for so long that it wouldn't start. (There's also a car in the garage, and theoretically you can still open the garage door by hand without power, but again, we're not completely confident about that, especially since the garage door has a tendency to freeze shut in this weather.) The gas cookstove still works without power (though you need to hand-light the burners) and we usually keep a filled 5-gallon can of water on hand, since there's no way to get water into the house without power to run the well pump and we've had outages as long as 8-12 hours before. But never when it was this cold; this would have been basically the worst-case scenario if it'd lasted overnight or longer.
Technically we have an emergency generator -- new, in the box, in the attic. But generators come with their own set of problems: once they're set up, they have to have gas and oil in them (and you can't just leave that sitting around for years or it won't work when you need it to), they need to be kept dry and warm enough to start up, etc. A generator that'd been sitting outside at -27 would have been as hard to start as the car. We talked about maybe building a generator shed next summer and getting the whole thing set up and wired in. So far, in the going-on-15 years we've lived out here, we have never had a power outage long enough that we'd have needed it. But last night would have been, if it'd lasted a few hours longer. So. It does get you thinking. A lot of people have wood stoves, not as their main source of heat but as a backup, for precisely this reason.
So that was our little adventure. And this morning it's still -24. Bleh. But at least there's power and the house is warm.
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There's always that one thing that you never need until the moment you do, and *really* do.
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As a Texan living in Louisiana, I have to say I find the mere thought of weather that cold pretty terrifying, let alone without power...^^;;
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Glad it all worked out.
I have never been in that kind of cold. I'm shivering just thinking about it.
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I wasn't aware you lived in Alaska.
Of course, now I want to pick your brain for realistic issues of living at -30C, in case I ever manage to finish writing my Game of Thrones story, set North of the Wall. A writer is me.
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My parents have a wood-burning stove and it works very nicely as a heater, though they do also have regular heat.
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It didn't occur to us either! ... until we actually ended up in that situation. It's funny what you don't even think about until you're actually in that situation. (One thing that randomly bugged me in The Martian is that duct tape doesn't work when it's super cold. It stops being sticky. I know this because I've tried to tape things at subzero temperatures and it just won't stick, at least not unless you keep the tape warm inside your coat, and then it still doesn't want to stick to the super-cold surface you're trying to stick it to! Which makes sense, as sticky things rely for their stickiness upon not being frozen. But it's unlikely you'd even think of that if you haven't actually tried to tape something in extreme cold. Which is not a situation that comes up for most people.)
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As much as I respect Chabon and enjoyed the book, I kept struggling with the very minor yet recurring point of how many vintage cars there apparently were in the book's Alaska... vintage cars that aren't babied in garages under tarps, like in real Alaska, but, in the protagonist's case, are hard-used by hard-boiled police detectives... and yet haven't been at all dissolved by road salt! At all!
Californian.
;-D
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A wood stove sounds like a good thing to have as backup. They can be nice for atmosphere too. My brother got a small one installed in his living room for that (even though wasn't exactly cheap and needed a bunch of paperwork because of the emission certifications and what not).
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but his flamethrower is not currently working because he used up all the propane in his portable propane tank trying to set a pile of wet brush on fire last fall.
I just... this entire sentence. o.O
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Not a dumb question at all! It's actually very sensible. The big problem is that when the engine has been sitting in that severe cold for that long, EVERYTHING is solid or close to solid - the oil, the lubricant - and it can self-destruct if you try to start it without warming the rest of it up a bit. (Old-timers have told me that before engine block heaters were a thing, car owners would drain out the oil at night and pour in warm oil in the morning to warm the engine a bit before trying to start it, which sounds like a hell of an enormous hassle for a commuter vehicle.) However, it would at least HELP, and it did occur to us last night and we were like "wow, that would've been a smart thing to do after we parked the car for the winter, wouldn't it?" XD (The fact that the car is currently buried under 3 feet of snow is also something of a problem.)
It probably WOULD work with the Subaru, at least enough to buy us a few more hours of useful car-starting time, but by the time we realized we could do that, we were already in bed and actually doing it would've involved getting out of the bed and going outside, so we decided that there was no point since someone had to get up at 3 a.m. anyway to stop the house from freezing. XD
Oh well, we've learned a ton for next time...
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Orion said he thinks he can warm it up with a flamethrower (this is what I'm married to, I'm just saying)
Based entirely on this sentence, I feel that he and
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Epic. XD
Have you ever heard of these ? They have this amazing feature that they're built like beds. I.e. it's in the middle of the house, and on the kitchen side it is a stove and on the bedroom side it's a slab of rock that warms up as the insides warm up. Amazing to sleep on in the winter :D And to be honest, anytime at night.
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(I'm currently, for the first time, living a place it might get that cold, but in a city apartment building, which is rather a different prospect. I've never had to deal with quite such a chain of failsafes! You sound admirably prepared, on the whole, but there's nothing like an almost-worst-case scenario to make one think.)
However, "Orion said he thinks he can warm it up with a flamethrower (this is what I'm married to, I'm just saying), but his flamethrower is not currently working because he used up all the propane in his portable propane tank trying to set a pile of wet brush on fire last fall" made me snort out loud.
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But I guess the back up generator is the way to go. You can keep the oil and fuel in there, but just run it every three months or so to make sure it starts right, run it for a couple of minutes before turning it off again.
But that is why we cook on gas, I guess loosing gas and electricity would be unique.
And we do have a wood stove, again, we heat on gas as well, but as a back up or if it is especially cold.
Good luck.
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Thank you for the vivid narrative that — as well as being a good read regardless! — reminds me, personally, that as much as I love my home state, I don't want to live there in the winter EVER AGAIN not even with global warming (okay, maybe with global warming) (but waterfront Anchorage, not landlocked Fairbanks) (never Juneau, of course) (I may have turned into an utter weather wimp, but I still have some pride).
;-)
Good luck!
May we never again see the like of the winter in my childhood when the diesel froze in the trucks!