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Fri 24 Jan, 2025 09:12 am
I want the temps to rise mostly because I want to play some golf, probably more than that ass-hole who now lives in the White House.
But it is colder than a witch's...uhhh, heart...and the snow is not melting. There are, however, things worse things than very cold weather and no golf.
Wednesday and Thursday were the two coldest days of the year here in New Jersey, with temps only getting into double digits for an hour or two on both days.
On Wednesday, my wife had to visit a sick relative down in Princeton and I was left alone at home with our cats. I was working the Internet speaking with some friends here and over in another forum...and I remember thinking that my fingers were especially cold while typing. But I have Raynaud's syndrome, so I didn't put much concern into it, even when the fingers started to turn white.
At some point I went into the living room where we have an indoor/outdoor thermometer. The outdoor temp read 10...the indoor temp read 50!
Holy ****...we have the thermostat set low, but at 66 - 67!
Then I realized that there was no sound of the furnace blowing hot air. So I did a couple of resets at the thermostat...and nothing worked. Apparently the furnace had crashed!
When Nancy got home, she called the utility company...who scheduled a technician for Thursday morning. We have a wood-burning stove...which I lit up and we used that to heat up the living room where we spent the rest of our waking day. We have a warming blanket on our bed, so a reasonable night's sleep was had.
Next morning the tech spends better part of an hour checking out everything about the furnace. He shared his thoughts sorta like Sherlock Holmes, "After eliminating everything that ain't the problem, whatever is left, however unlikely, is the truth."
Then he added, "If you go to a lamp and the light won't go on, you do not normally check the circuit breaker or suppose the lamp is defective...you first change the bulb. 99.9 % of the time when this problem comes up...it is the furnace. Only .1% of the time is it the thermostat. But..."
He crossed two wires, becoming the thermostat for while, and BINGO! The thing fired up like a charm.
So I installed a new thermostat...and all is well.
But we froze our asses off for a while there.
It sure was uncomfortable for a while, though.
Hope all youse guys are weathering the weather well.
@Frank Apisa,
We're familiar with cold weather in Maine but I had a scare a few years ago when it dropped down to -17º and the power went out. I wasn't afraid of freezing to death because we have two auxiliary propane space heaters and a woodstove. But there's a crawl space under one wing of the house and when I went down into the cellar I could feel that it was cooling off pretty fast. There are some hydronic lines that go into that dark freezing crawl space. If these lines froze and cracked it would be very bad. I hemmed and hawed for a while but finally bit the bullet and went down there to drain the heating system. I was just beginning to figure out where to start when the power came back on! Phew! The next time the furnace was cleaned and adjusted I had them put antifreeze in the hydronic system.
@hightor,
hightor wrote:
We're familiar with cold weather in Maine but I had a scare a few years ago when it dropped down to -17º and the power went out. I wasn't afraid of freezing to death because we have two auxiliary propane space heaters and a woodstove. But there's a crawl space under one wing of the house and when I went down into the cellar I could feel that it was cooling off pretty fast. There are some hydronic lines that go into that dark freezing crawl space. If these lines froze and cracked it would be very bad. I hemmed and hawed for a while but finally bit the bullet and went down there to drain the heating system. I was just beginning to figure out where to start when the power came back on! Phew! The next time the furnace was cleaned and adjusted I had them put antifreeze in the hydronic system.
The fun of house ownership!
our kitchen never really warms up properly in winter because it shares a single forced air vent with an adjacent bathroom.
also off the kitchen is a small vestibule with a door, which leads to the backdoor of the house.
so one chilly winter i thought i'd be smart and close the vestibule door, thus making the kitchen a little warmer.
well it was working nicely until i tried using the bathroom sink... the pipes were frozen!
lesson learned...
@Region Philbis,
That sounds depressingly familiar.
@Region Philbis,
Region Philbis wrote:
our kitchen never really warms up properly in winter because it shares a single forced air vent with an adjacent bathroom.
also off the kitchen is a small vestibule with a door, which leads to the backdoor of the house.
so one chilly winter i thought i'd be smart and close the vestibule door, thus making the kitchen a little warmer.
well it was working nicely until i tried using the bathroom sink... the pipes were frozen!
lesson learned...
To me also.
There is a room in our basement that I use for storage and as a place to do some shop work. When we first bought the house, we noticed it was a cold room, but we tolerated it. I did not use it much during the winter anyway.
But one particularly cold winter, it turned out that the pipes in that area (just below our kitchen) froze up. Kitchen sink became worthless, because an area of disposal pipes ended up freezing shut. I managed eventually to warm the pipes up enough to get drainage going, but I was stymied by why the thing actually froze. Yeah, it was cold (some single degree nights), but this was inside. There was a window by the pipes that let in some light, but we were never able to gest a good look/see through. And the outer area of this window was not accessible because of some bushes. Just a modicum of light coming through.
I decided it would be a good idea to put some rigid insulation in the window to help insulate from the outside cold.
Good thing I did. During contortions necessary for the insulation installation...I found that both panes of glass from the window were missing completely. That area, which was where the disposal pipes made a 45% turn was (and always had been) totally exposed to the outside.
Hell of a discovery.
I'm waiting for Spring, or whenever the outside heats up.
@glitterbag,
That's how many days to go?
38 degrees overnight temps. Four days or so with windy and cold. Now it’s sunny and hopeful. In despair, people are attempting to jump off their roofs but most buildings are one story so nothing serious happened.
This is the coldest spell in Sarasota since I moved here in 2010. No history of snow here but there was trace somewhere closer to Tampa decades ago.
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