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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

#301

Post by jabroni_salad »

ndndndndj wrote: post #20
yxhuvud wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees fall down due to combination of heavy snow and wind. They probably don't cut sufficiently around power lines. It is extra bad if the ground hasn't frozen properly yet. In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.

But why are power lines above ground in the first place?

When you build a home in the middle of nowhere, you actually have to pay for the power line to be run out to you. Burying utilities is tremendously expensive if you are footing the bill on your own.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#302

Post by jimnotgym »

jaggederest wrote: post #288
jimnotgym wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just looking at a map though, and Helsinki is on the south coast. It appears Finland extends right up to the Arctic circle. I would guess they get more snow up there? Any Finns like to chime in?

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#303

Post by jaggederest »

jimnotgym wrote: post #302
jaggederest wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just looking at a map though, and Helsinki is on the south coast. It appears Finland extends right up to the Arctic circle. I would guess they get more snow up there? Any Finns like to chime in?

https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/snow-statistics

Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Rainier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#304

Post by tjohns »

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).

The part about power outages is certainly true in Tahoe. I grew up there and remember a week-long power outage as a kid, since the snow took out the feeder lines from both CA and NV simultaneously.

Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#305

Post by UltraSane »

derefr wrote: post #287
UltraSane wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be a LOT of snow.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#306

Post by tristor »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #293
Tor3 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The first thing I do when buying a second-hand car (I never buy new cars, what a waste of money) is to buy the best winter tires (and summer tires if needed) that money can buy (lots of that available, as I save so much on the car). I never have any problems in any conditions (and there are a lot of "conditions..") All seasons tires are rubbish. Also the "new" ones (re sister comment).

That hasn’t been true for a very long time.

It actually still is true. I drive on all-season touring tires on my current vehicle because I drive across varied climates, but never in real winter conditions, that said true summer tires have much better stopping distance, better rain/wet handling, and massively better dry handling characteristics than all-season tires, and true winter tires have much better everything than all-seasons in snow and especially in ice.

All-season tires have massively improved, but /so have summer and winter tires/. So sure, your all-seasons today may be superior to very old standards for prior generations of tires, but you are still the absolute safest when you have appropriate tires on your vehicle. Tires are fundamentally all that holds your vehicle to the ground.

Also as much as I love AWD, it does basically fuck-all to help in winter conditions. The thing you need to worry about is /stopping/ not necessarily getting going again, and in both cases a FWD car with winter tires is worlds better than any AWD car on all-seasons. I swap to winter tires on my AWD cars when I spend significant time in areas where it snows (e.g. when I lived for several years in Colorado). It doesn't matter how many wheels are used to drive, all vehicles use all 4 wheels to stop, but if you have no traction you are fucked. Anyone telling you otherwise is ill-informed.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#307

Post by 00N8 »

Tor3 wrote: post #85
slillibri wrote: post #2

The main lesson I learned was I didn’t have to live in a snowy place. I left SW Michigan in 2000 and haven’t looked back. I don’t like being cold, but I loathe snow and ice.

Cold and dry is not a problem. You can always add more layers of clothing and get very comfortable. Warm and humid is a real problem. You can't just remove clothing until you're comfortable. And the humidity.. there's no remedy to fix that.

Good point. I've always found high humidity makes things a lot more unpleasant unless the temperature is in a fairly narrow range around 71°F or so. It intensifies the heat of course, but IME it also makes chilly weather a lot harsher too. I get uncomfortably cold really easily when it's e.g. 51°F with a cool damp ocean breeze in places like SF or Monterey, but when I go to the mountains in winter, 25-32°F is totally comfortable -- even in literally the same clothing. I think it must be partly a psychological effect, but humidity seems to play a role too (along with other factors like IR reflection off the snow).

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#308

Post by testing22321 »

827a wrote: post #180

Interesting conversation I had with someone from a semi-warmer climate recently, as they visited: After seeing all the snow on the ground, they commented "wow it must snow all the time here". Me: "Well, we had that big winter storm, when was that, three weeks ago? I don't think its snowed much since then". You can see the gears turning as they come to the realization that snow doesn't, like, go anywhere. If it snows…

I had to fix a wheel bearing on my car in winter, no garage, just in the driveway. I was telling my Aussie dad it’s hard to be outside, lying on the ground etc when the air temp is past about -35.

He said why not wait till the sun comes out and it warms up? The temp only goes up a couple of degrees during the day.

Yukon.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#309

Post by literalAardvark »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #281
literalAardvark wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one is saying to drive all year with your summers. Those will glass in winter.

Re: Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

#310

Post by maxerickson »

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 live in a small town in northern Michigan and while we do somewhat regularly have power outages during the winter, it's when we get freezing rain, snow isn't really a problem (and really, I haven't had issues here in town, I'm describing the issues that have hit the region).
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