Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#281

Post by ThrowawayTestr » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

literalAardvark wrote: post #260

kjkjadksj wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are laws of physics you can’t hand waive away. Winter tires are really more cold temp tires. The rubber formulation is different to allow for grip in the cold and dry (tread pattern for cold and snow). As such a winter tire wears heavily driven in the summer, rubber formulation is just too soft. For an all season that level of summer wear would be unacceptable. So a different formulation is used to improve summ…

Please read the studies in this thread. Modern high quality all weather tyres are excellent in summer and winter. Except on actual snow, where they're just ok, because of the hybrid sipe patterns, and ice, where they suck exactly as much as everything else except studded tyres (which suck on tarmac instead).

Even after the streets are plowed there's still a bit of snow on the main roads and a lot on the side roads. Maybe you live in a place with really mild winters, but my car would have drifted into a ditch many times this winter if I didn't swap my tires.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#282

Post by bproctor » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

throwaway173738 wrote: post #210

coffeebeqn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow

In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area. I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t inv…

I've lived 40+ years in several places in the northern US, mostly in rural areas and this isn't my experience at all.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#283

Post by bombcar » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #226

yokoprime wrote: post #25

> 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.

Indiana here. Power outages due to fallen tree limbs, frozen trees "exploding", ice accumulation on lines, etc. is fairly common. It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that). https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...

It’s not really a question of urban/rural but more a question of “buried transmission lines” or not.

We have buried lines and have few if any power issues. richer town a bit over does not, and loses power once a winter or so.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#284

Post by bombcar » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #232

dlcarrier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The big difference is that snow tires are self cleaning; everything else ends up being ice covered slicks after a bit of driving.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#285

Post by derefr » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #273

dathinab wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A-frames are often used in snowy climates as a vacation home, park ranger patrol station, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilderness_hut. Such buildings are un-lived-in for much of the year, if not "indefinitely until needed." The building needs to survive, not being crushed by snow, without any human supervision.

As TFA emphasizes, grid electricity is unstable in rural places in winter; which means that even if such a building were able to be grid-connected (often not), and even if the building's owner was willing to spend electricity heating the building year-round in their absence (almost certainly not), the building would be likely to lose electricity at the worst possible moment: when there's tons of snow piling up and no humans there to shovel it.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#286

Post by greenie_beans » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #169

yokoprime wrote: post #25

> 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).

imagine finding this painful to read because it doesn't describe your world

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#287

Post by derefr » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #229

pastage wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tradition says that this is not true but honestly I have no real experience except I have done the calculation for our roof. According to our local building standards at 60⁰ you basically have zero snow load, I am not sure what angle a shallow angle roof is but 30⁰ is max load. 6kN/m² is a lot of extra strength.

The only limit to how strong you can make a roof is really money. If you space joists or trusses half as far apart you will about double the max snow load.

At a certain point the problem stops being the roof, and starts being subsidence of the ground under the increasingly-heavy building.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#288

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #276

jaggederest wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Total accumulation matters in roof design, not single-day dumps. The mountain I'm referring to (and others like it) can get 100cm+ single day, but that's not super common.

Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#289

Post by goalieca » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

yokoprime wrote: post #25

> 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.

Canada here, and it's gone out in winter. Not normal during snow storm but very common during ice storms.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#290

Post by bmitch3020 » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

Two lessons for driving in snow/ice:

1. In a parking lot, clear behind the car, and just enough to get inside. Then back the car out of the space, clear the car off, clear the parking space out, put the car back in the parking space and clear everything you knocked off. If tried without pulling the car out of the space, you'd be trying not to ding up your neighbor's car, clearing in tight spaces under the car, and then doing it all again when you clear off the top of the car into that narrow gap.

2. Don't drive unless you absolutely need to. You may know what you're doing, but others almost certainly don't. But do make sure to clear out at least one car, just in case there's an emergency.