No mention of wool unfortunately, if you've got to be wet and cold... nothing else beats it.
Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
231–240 of 346 posts
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#232Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires. Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.
I'm in the foothills in Northern California, and I've never met anyone here that changes their ties out for winter. When there's chain controls, they'll let you through if you have winter rated tires, including all-season, and all-wheel drive, otherwise you need chains. Everyone I know who drives a lot in the snow gets a vehicle with all-wheel drive and everyone else carries chains. (really they're cables, on a small…
> The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#233I really do hate throwing shade on someone's article, but this reads like one of those "Pearls of Wisdom from Two Years of Junior-Level Software Development". Thanks, person who just a few months ago moved to a snowy, remote area with poor infrastructure, but this is NOT how you flush a toilet with no running water: " Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl a…
It’s been a while since I had to operate a toilet without water service but what they described only works for the first flush since the tank would be full. After that, the tank is empty and after you fill the bowl, with the tank still empty, there will be barely any gravity assisted flow to “flush”. Makes me think they’ve actually never been in that situation.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#234> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
This article is a bit painful to read. It should be lessons from living in the remote wildnerness in winter. Pretty much all those problems are relative to rural infrastructure and poor home building. If you live in an area with heavy snow load you want an A-frame roof to de-load the roof (for example see: Tahoe, CA ~ 500-800" snow a year).
Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#235Is it possible to use a flamethrower instead of a shovel to clear your driveway?
The math there gets pretty bad pretty fast. A cubic foot of snow represents ~15 lbs of ice. That corresponds to at 144 BTU to melt a lb of ice, that means you need at a minimum 2160 BTU of fuel (assuming 100% of your heat goes to melting the snow). A gallon of gasoline represents about 114,000 BTU, so each gallon of gas could clear, in a best case scenario where you can capture 100% of the heat, only 50 cubic feet of snow. That's a 10-foot by 10-foot area covered in 6 inches of snow.
But even that's in the dream scenario where somehow your snow is in a sealed, insulated space. In the real world, snow tends to be outside, in the cold air, which is very eager to sink and replace any hot air you make at ground level. So you're losing any heat that warms the air at all. And all that air in the snow makes it a fantastic insulator, meaning the vast majority of your heat isn't going to penetrate.
Interestingly, this same phenomena makes melting snow from underneath much more effective (as the great insulating snow captures the heat). You still need to grapple with the kinda nuts amount of energy it takes to melt ice, but at least you're not wasting 90% of it.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#236> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
Norway is probably one of the better managed countries on earth
I like it, but your statement is an generalisation.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#237Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the…
The entire article is half-assed assumptions mixed with common sense. The only lesson is to prepare before the snow season arrives or suffer.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early. Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing. Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
Hey Vi burde alle chat litt. Vi bor jo alle litt i nærheten.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#239I'll add this - for the love of God, please brush the snow off your car before you drive, especially after a storm.
If it gets above freezing during the day and freezes again at night, the snow will go through a melt/freeze cycle to become a nice thick sheet of ice. I don't know how many times I've seen a 3 inch sheet of ice go flying off a car traveling 70 mph on the Garden State Parkway. This is common sense and it's infuriating how brain dead people are about this. Incidents have killed people before.
Thankfully I've also seen NJ State Troopers hand out tickets for this. I now live in a state, Washington, where the politicians are too busy grandstanding on stupid issues while ice sheets go flying at cars around on the freeway after a snowstorm.
Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
#240> Even if your house technically runs on propane, and you have propane, electricity might still run the propane, so your house is going to get cold. Unless you run the woodstove. Which you will
Corollary: don’t buy a house in a place where it snows without two fully independent sources of heat. You want backups. There’s a reason why woodstoves are so popular in New England. A millivolt gas log stove on a thermostat can also be a good alternative.