When it's forecast to drop to -3 F and your power suddenly goes out...
And here I am using those 3 minutes and 30 seconds to make this meme. I have no regreš„¶
Update: Life support restored.
If your power goes out for more than a couple hours in the winter, bring everyone in the house to a medium sized room and build a pillow fort. Hang up blankets over all the entryways and windows in that room, and get comfortable. It might sound silly, but it's a lot easier to keep a single room warm than the entire house and it could save the life of you or someone you care about.
The good thing about having two dogs is that they're cuddly space heaters who occasionally fart. lol
I actually do have an emergency plan for this scenario. Back corner of the finished basement is the most insulated part of the house, so it's where we go in weather emergencies (tornado warnings, etc).
It's also possible to build a very effective and safe alcohol space heater with about $7 of parts, which can be kept on-hand in case of emergency.
Set up a tent. I sat in my nieces little play tent once and it was hot in there even with the "door" and "window".
My dog knows to crawl under my covers; everyone else is on their own. (Plus weāve never had an outage long enough to worry about it)
Did that one year in a cold snap; ended up having a pipe freeze and burst.
It was... Not fun.
We have spare mattresses around that we use to block doors and windows. Very useful
And that is why winter as an electrician is Generator Hookup Season
I swear those are easily half the calls I get rn
Yeah, a whole house genset is on my list. I have a small one, but it can't run my heat pump; it's mostly just used to keep my servers and fridge running.
I live near a few important things and am on the same part of the grid as them, so unless it's a very local outage (basically on my street), then it usually gets fixed pretty quickly because the important things are also down. So that's kind-of kept me from really making a generator a priority.
I love how when Life Support starts to fail the crew acts woozy as if their batteries are running down, finally collapsing. Then when Life Support comes back they slowly reboot and stand up again and be like, Whew!
Playing FTL taught me that when you need to reroute power, life support is the first to go.
Keeping weapons hot, engines full and shields up make you dish out or avoid damage. The crew can hold their breath.
Upgrade doors lock my guys in the medbay and open the doors to space.
Right? The ships are quite cavernous. You'd think the cabin air would last them more than half a second lol.
That really sucks.
Make sure to run some of your taps a little so the pipes don't freeze as the interior of your house cools
If you have a garage migrate items from your fridge to the garage or yard or a balcony. They'll keep there (we always used the garage as a fridge in the winter).
Make sure to secure some water in containers in the middle of your home, and do whatever you can to keep warm.
Taping plastic wrap around your windows will keep the house warm longer, it's surprisingly effective.
Yeah, if I think the house is going to deep-freeze, I usually just shut off the service valve, drain the water out of the pipes (open a faucet upstairs and one downstairs), and wrap a blanket around the valve to try to keep it from freezing. If it gets to that point, I'm usually looking to abandon ship if possible to somewhere more hospitable.
migrate items from your fridge to the garage or yard or a balcony.
During one outage at my old house (where power outages were very common), I was bored and piled up a bunch of snow on the patio and made a snow fridge with shelves and everything. lol. Worked great.
I do keep jugs of water on hand in the basement for emergencies, but yeah, good call to move them somewhere with less heat loss in events like this.
Thankfully, everything came back up after just about an hour, so warm and toasty now.
Is it supposed to genuinely get below freezing in your place for an extended period of time?
If not, it's always good to fill up a bath tub full of water in emergencies like being able to flush toilets, take a whore bath, or whatever. There's also a product called a Water Bob which is food-gradr plastic bag that you put in your tub and fill up from the faucet so you have potable water.
Iāve got a wood stove, but if I didnāt Iād have my thermostat set for 80 just to have some extra warmth if the power goes out.
(Yes I learned this from Technology Connections.)
If I tried that my heater would never stop running. No, Alec, I do not have a relatively modern well-insulated house. šš šš
Ugh, same. Just have not had the opportunity (read: money) to have everything re-insulated.
I still have gas hookup since I haven't upgraded my hot water heater to the heat pump one yet. I was going to have all that removed eventually, but I may keep it and put a vent-free gas fireplace downstairs.
What video is that from? Setting it that high sounds insane to me, I am not made of money. Also just uncomfortably hot.
It was the one where he was talking about his heating and cooling strategy; he cools/heats his house overnight when electricity is cheap and then lets it coast during the day.
It was also about smart meters and how they just cut peopleās usage. He argued that warming up/cooling down houses prior to a potential outage or higher demand would even it out.
Maybe 80 is too warm, but going up a couple degrees to give yourself a bit more comfort if the power goes out seems like a sound principle.
I've found out that my gas stove is capable of keeping the whole house reasonably warm while also not setting off the carbon monoxide detector after running for a long time, so that's nice. I think the oven would need to be plugged into a battery backup so the ignitor/thermostat circuit would work, but the cooktop burners don't.
That was our big surprise discovery when we moved into a place with a gas stove: we could still have hot food (cooked indoors) during power outages. We just had to light the range with a match.
Our landlord remodeled our kitchen (to something very nice, so we put up with it) a few years prior, so we had already gotten used to adapting recipes to cook on the grill or smoker. Not having to move outside to access heat every meal is a luxury I don't take for granted anymore, and especially right now as we're in what the locals call a cold snap.
I'm up in northern Ontario Canada .... it dropped to -40 last night .... and no need to convert because its the same temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit ... but we were prepared
We have a wood stove and (indoor safe) kerosene and propane heaters; it gets a bit uncomfortable when it's really cold outside, but not as uncomfortable as, say, a dry cabin in Alaska.