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Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

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Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#271

Post by deltoidmaximus »

Marsymars wrote: post #55
Quothling wrote: post #43

24. Check your attic. If snow blows in there because your roof is damaged then it will melt and slowly turn your entire house into fungi. The damage to your roof can be so tiny you wouldn't spot it and your attic could still fill up during a snow storm. It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.

This is a concern of mine, and my attics (3 of them due to the way the house is built) are pretty inconvenient to check, so I put some battery-powered temp/humidity sensors in them. Haven't gotten around to setting up any alerting thresholds though... I'm not actually entirely sure what temp/humidity thresholds would actually be useful.

Maybe you could put a camera up there to check for snow. Not sure how you'd power it if it was wireless though, not a lot of solar energy in an attic.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#272

Post by deltoidmaximus »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #172

> If you’re short on kindling, sufficient cardboard CAN be used to light a big log on fire. Another trick to make kindling, take cardboard or old egg boxes or I suppose kindling wood and dip them in molten candle wax / paraffin.

If you're my FIL you just put kerosene on the log first.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#273

Post by UltraSane »

dathinab wrote: post #249
UltraSane wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An A-frame is a overkill solution to snow load when you can just make a shallower roof stronger.

only to a limit enough snow, especially if compacted, especially if it involves melting + refreezing cycles turning part of it too ice and even robust concrete building can have some surprising issues but it's true that for what most places in the world need a slightly tilted and structural stable roof is good enough, if you know how to clean it if things to south

If you get that much snow you should build heating into the roof to melt the snow just enough to slide off

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#274

Post by esmIII »

dlcarrier wrote: post #59
brettgriffin wrote: post #4

Put 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…

I went to school at Michigan Tech where we would regularly get over 300 inches in the winter. I drove a Honda civic with snow tires. It was fine even on steep slopes. Winter tires keep you from loosing traction and sliding off the road. AWD helps you get back on the road after you slide off.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#275

Post by mindslight »

ghc wrote: post #204
ghaff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live in ex-urban MA and it’s not common but have had a couple of multi-day power outages in both winter and summer over the decades I’ve lived here. Don’t remember the details of the summer outage but the winter one was a massive ice storm.

Sure, but that's not the same as losing power during the first snowstorm every year. The massive ice storm was back in 2010 IIRC.

The major ice storm I remember might have been 2012 or 2013. There was also a different snow storm (maybe that was 2010?) at the end of October when all the leaves were still on the trees. My parents lost power for something like 6 days (so much damage the crews were swamped). I had been visiting them, and gtfo as the snow was falling, and never lost power 2 hours away.

I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience.

Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell.

The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#276

Post by jimnotgym »

jaggederest wrote: post #266
cheeseface wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland, where you can easily get 30cm or more snow, all roofs are required to stand 100-300kg/m2 by law and most roofs are less than 30 degrees (e.g. 1:2 ratio). A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.

30cm is just kinda cute. Try 600cm - you'll find a lot of A-frames up the mountain, where they routinely get >700cm of snow each year and generally no thaw until spring. Alaska, similarly, but there you'll find more domes and steep-roofed chalets, since it gets proper cold (-40) and insulation uber alles is the rule. The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't n…

I read this as in Finland you can get 30cm snow in a day. And the second person is comparing that to 600cm in a year. Am I right?

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#277

Post by humanpotato »

standarditem wrote: post #186

The other way to flush a toilet without running water is to fill the tank of the toilet with water, then flush it normally.

The only sane way unless you have not enough water to fill the tank. Oh wait, you can fill it with that solid water on the ground, as long as you give it a few hours to melt from the ambient heat in the house between each use.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#278

Post by jjav »

dlcarrier wrote: post #143
jjav wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Yeah.. no. The difference is night and day. Put on some Nokian Hakkapeliitta tires and prepare to be amazed. The grip on snow is spectacular. All the years I lived in snow areas I drove a Miata of all things.. RWD, light, no ABS, no TC, 4" clearance. But with Hakkapeliitta tires I n…

The difference between two-wheel and all-wheel drive is night and day, compared to the difference between winter and summer tires. Even then, it all goes out the door when conditions get icy and the only option is studs or chains, to get any traction. Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state. Most politicians are from Sou…

> The difference between two-wheel and all-wheel drive is night and day, compared to the difference between winter and summer tires.

No, this is incorrect. Just try it.

Summer tires are hopeless in freezing temperatures (and are not rated by the manufacturer to be used in such cold), as they become rock hard. As much grip as plastic kids big wheel tires.

Ultimately, what you need the most, is grip. You could have an 8-wheel drive vehicle but if the tires have no grip it will just spin in place.

In the snow by far the biggest advantage comes from true snow tires (not M+S or all season) due to how much grip they'll provide.

A 4x4 is an additional advantage, of course. A 4x4 on snow tires will do better than a 2-wheel drive with snow tires. But a 2-wheel drive on snow tires is infinitely better than a 4x4 on summer tires because if there is no grip, there's no grip.

If you are driving on pure ice then yes, chains or better yet, studs, are the way to go. That is a very rare scenario.

> Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state.

No, these are state-wide Caltrans rules.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#280

Post by derefr »

dathinab wrote: post #247
boringg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This isn't fully true. Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble. EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof. And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weigh…

> This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people.

A-frames are steeply-angled enough that the weight mostly loads on itself (i.e. a snow drift builds up against the side of the house) rather than loading the roof. The whole point of the design is to be steeper than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose of snow, so that snow can't pile up on the roof to the point that it forms ice; it must slough off quickly, as soon as it reaches some aggregation threshold — just like water droplets must drip down off a shower door after some aggregation threshold.

("Slow" snowfall, meanwhile, gets melted away rather than frozen on; the A-frame is the entire building envelope, and is also usually made of a highly thermally-conductive material; together, these properties mean that 99% of heat lost from the interior is lost into this giant metal heatsink that wraps around the building, where the heat then conducts quickly inside that giant metal heatsink, warming up whatever cold spots there are anywhere along its surface. As long as the building has any kind of heating going on inside, the roof is essentially acting like a heated windshield.)

A-frames also go all the way to the ground. There's nowhere for a person to stand where "snow (or even ice) sloughing off the sides" is dangerous, because there's never a plummet phase to that slough-off; the snow arrives at the ground with very little speed, having been lightly friction-braked the whole time, since it was basically sliding down a metal slide. (That being said, you would never build an A-frame house under the expectation of having accessible sidewalks around it during the winter. You assume that snow drifts will pile up on both sides. You want to go to the back yard? You go through the house. This is also why you never see an A-frame surrounded with a fence: the inevitable snowdrift would knock any side-fences over.)

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