> 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).
Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
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.
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. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.
Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.
Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.
PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.
> 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.)
A-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.
Depends what you are optimizing for -- roof collapse in a high snow load local or the level of efficiency for thermal properties. You can drive for high efficiency of your thermal properties but when your roof collapses those efficiencies are meaningless.
Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
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
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.
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.
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 need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
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?
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 Ranier, 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.
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.
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 invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.
> 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 live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.
People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.
Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
Or somewhere remote. Czechia is a small country with a well-developed grid and nothing here is really "remote" compared to, say, Alaska.
But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.
It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
Also live in Norway, nord Trøndelag. Power went out 3 timeslast year, few times for days, but that was an unusual winter. This years it’s only gone out for a few hours.
Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.
like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C
then a warmer winter would have
- more black ice
- more ice rain
- more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.)
- wetter snow (so heavier)
etc.
Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.
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).
Unfortunately that won't always save you. One of my clients spent a pretty long time unpowered because some creek bed froze (why did they bury thru a creek bed???). When I called for followup they advised me that the truck they sent to remediate had its hydraulics freeze so there was an additional delay.
Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.
Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
It's pretty much a "countries with bad infrastructure" problem.
But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.
Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).
I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.
Might be all of that infrastructure paid by oil, on the other side of the border in a not that remote of an area (10people/km²). We have absolutely had power outages lasting several days.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Midwest (where it snows plenty), and our electricity came from a rural co-op ("rural co-ops", because no one else is going to drag electrical wires out here, so we'll do it ourselves). We rarely lost power, the infrastructure where the TFA author lives just sucks.
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.
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.
As an adolescent in Fayette (Maine), I had great fun helping out our neighbors with summertime tree-pruning parties. FWIW we had few power issues during winter, and our winters frequently featured 4-6 feet of snow cover.
As much as a bunch of people on HN want to attribute this to European superiority or tax rate or investment or whatever, it's not. It's just a willingness to maintain things and not let idiots with no real problems roadblock the process.
I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.
My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.
I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.
I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.
In the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.
In Sweden it also almost never happens but this year there was a hurricane like storm that fell lots of trees and thousands of people had no power for days. But yeah it wasn’t because of snow.
This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance:
Where I live (pacific northwest), it's not snow that's the problem, but windstorms. Presumably knocking over trees, which in turn takes down power lines - which of course implies said trees are tall, in proximity to the power lines, and not cut down. I maybe average 24 hours of outage per year (frequently less, but occasionally spiking to a multi-day outage.)
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
Yeah, it was interesting to see some above-ground-to-the-premises power delivery in some of the smaller Norwegian villages above the arctic circle. Things looked rather robust, though.
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
or might find SOMEONE ELSE stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown.
yes, obviously "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" (so you remain an asset instead of a liability), but please remember the "helping others" part (so you remain an asset instead of a liability).
My parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines.
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
Underground power lines are weirdly vulnerable to lightning strikes.
I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated.
This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw.
Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.
This is largely true in places with above ground power lines, like the US. I happen to live in an area with buried lines and have never actually lost power due to snow.
In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
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 below freezing, that snow stays on the ground. It doesn't melt. The city can move it to more convenient locations, and a very few rich cities have snow melting machines, but most cities don't. Its obvious when you think about it, but if all you're used to is rain its not trivially obvious: The grand snow strategy of most municipalities is "hope it gets warm soon".
This is an interesting way to frame it, but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?
The other main ways you lose snow are: sublimation, wind blowing it elsewhere, compaction, and getting dirty (darker color helps it melt in the sun). All of these are relevant for other cities in the snow.
> but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?
this is how glaciers are created
snow getting stuck up, not melting, compressing by weight into much much smaller ice and then more stacking up. And during the last ice age this repeating for a very long time (because snow is mostly air, so the amount of ice you get from it is very little).
The reasons why this isn't too big of an issue on the north/south pool, Antarctica etc. is because this places are also very dry/don't have a lot of snow fall.
To have snowfall you need water in the air. Which mostly comes from heat evaporating water. This doesn't happen in non stop freezing cold places.
So the wind needs to carry the wet air over.
But there is a gradient between hot wet air places and very cold places. So a lot of water rains or snows off before reaching the places where snow doesn't melt.
A large part of the south pool is technically a desert as it has hardly any _new_ snow fall. Just a lot of years old snow getting moved around by wind.
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
Gloves are not for severe cold. They are for dexterity during limited exposure time - as no gloves can keep your fingers warm for very long no matter how well-made they are.
Look for mittens or "choppers" as we called them back in the day if you are going to be outside for a long period of time. These are outer shells (leather or gore-tex/etc.) with various types of removable liners. You basically layer your hands inside them. For folks outside all day you usually would have a few liners on hand to replace when they get wet.
Add a heat pack (iron oxide) to these on those super cold days and you'll be pretty much set.
A big thing I would add is to strongly consider how much you'll be moving, especially when it comes to footwear.
Boots that are rated to -40 during light activity can leave you with cold toes if you're standing still in -10 for an hour.
Activity levels also dictate how you layer and how easily you need to dump heat. If you're hiking, snowshoeing, XC skiing, you want some layers with zips so you can quickly let heat out.
A buff works pretty well instead of a balaclava and can serve the same purpose and more. Essentially just a tube of stretchy fabric that you can wear around your neck and pull up into a close enough approximation of a balaclava.
Any sold at a physical ski shop. You will make a face at the price. You will reconsider the sketchy ones for their price. But the ski shop ones will last significantly longer.
The key word you’re looking for is a "pac boot" depending on where you live you can get insulated, but honestly unless your live somewhere super cold and snowy, you probably don't need insulation. if you put on warm socks, keep snow out of them, are moving around, and aren't outside for hours on end you'll probably be fine even in really cold weather.
Baffin make some of the best cold weather boots. We use them in Antarctica, though you probably don't want the chonky -70C rated ones. I have some lighter boots rated for about -40 and they're great. Really any good gore tex mid-ankle hiking boot is probably fine. Whether you need cold rated boots is going to depend on where you're walking.
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
There are many brands making proper shoes/boots for winter hiking.
I would recommend taking a look at Haix, Lowa, Salomon Quest series, Lundhags and Meindl.
I prefer military boots, they have no branding and are typically designed and tested for decent longevity and comfort. My current ones are Bundeswehr surplus, I believe Meindl produced them. They cost about 60 euros or so, never been used.
Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.
Yeah, I know, I've been in the military, but my requirements are much simpler. I'm not going to walk fifty to seventy kilometers per day in them, and I also don't want to spend as much time taking care of my boots as they do. If I happen to walk through a bog too many and the stench gets permanent it feels better to get a replacement pair if they cost like 60 euros rather than 2-300.
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 vehicle)
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.
I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.
"If anyone gets an AWD vehicle “for safety” but uses it with all-season tires, they have performed a Consumer Sucka Fail. A front wheel drive vehicle with snow tires would have more grip.
According to this Consumer Reports test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXjzYbpt9Ow) on snow tires vs. AWD, the tires were by far the most important factor. And only 12% of AWD vehicle owners bothered to put snow tires on their vehicle, meaning 88% of all-wheel-drive vehicle purchases were wasted, because the drivers could have achieved better performance at lower cost in a front-wheeler with snow tires."
> 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.
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.
As others have said, this is very wrong. I live in Vermont an Duse "all season" tires as my summer tires on both my Subaru and my 4wd truck. I absolutely change to winter tires on both vehicles (studded, on the truck), and the difference in snowy conditions is night and day.
Interesting, here in Sweden it’s mandatory to change tires. Once I did it a bit late and drove on some ice, just a little. The car was like on ice skates for a little while .
Driving discipline, culture, and rules in North America are Mickey Mouse.
The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …
The United States also covers a vast difference in climate. What good are snow tires for people in South Florida, or Texas, or New Mexico? Where I live I switch between summer and all season cause we get enough snow to justify snow tires once a decade for a couple
of days. This year has been the worse with two weekends with a decent amount of snow that was cleaned off the roads by Tuesday.
I wonder if it's a carryover of an old regulation that used to make sense. Modern all-season tires are better in snow than the best winter tires were several decades ago.
Also, you need studs or chains to get traction on ice. The difference between a winter tire and a summer tire is the temperature range where the rubber stays flexible. When the rubber gets hard, it will keep its shape instead of complying with the surface of the road, so it loses traction quicker. Ice is flat, so there's no difference between tire types, and there's nothing to grip on to.
Nordic studless winter tires (different from Central European winter tires so also probably different from whatever you get in the US) do give some grip on ice, while all-seasons can be nearly as bad as summer tires. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
The government has done ongoing research on these subjects and the regulations do get renewed (e.g. some properly rated all-seasons are now allowed)
Piggdekk in Norway are equivalent to North American studded tires. When I lived in the northern parts of the U.S., I had a set of these for times around freezing rains.
Beyond the questions of winter weather properties, there are adjacent tradeoffs between the tire types (outside of studded):
1. Fuel economy
2. Noise
3. Degree of particulate pollution emission
I'm sure that the all-season tires probably have some negative tradeoffs in these regards to, which yields a choose the most optimal product for the time of year. All-season tires to me seem like a convenience food for places where the weather can be legitimately bad.
One other difference that is hard to articulate to North American drivers with respect to understanding Scandinavia and roads: there are places where snow and ice will literally not be removed (maybe not even removeable) from the road when plowed (I presume until spring melt). It just becomes a thick ice pack over the course of weeks. I never encountered any roads in my life (including Northern Minnesota) that were this inclement. North American roads tend to be cleared (plowing or melting) to asphalt or pavement.
All-season tires aren't simply a matter of convenience, they offer a safety benefit. If you aren't driving at normal highway speeds, even if it's the dead of winter and the air is below freezing, your tires will heat up and the winter tires won't have as much traction. The disadvantage on dry roads can be several times what the advantage was on contaminated roads, including during the winter.
If tires complying with the standards overlap, then the standards are meaningless. When there's requirements for snow tires, but not for X brand or model of snow tire, than it's not doing any good. That's why it's important to have a snow rating that can apply to tires of any type, and if it meets that rating, regardless of the rating for dry warm weather, than it should be good to go, otherwise not.
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).
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.
All-wheel drive doesn't help you at all where it is most important, and that is in braking. Having all-wheel drive only helps you get up to a dangerous speed faster when the grip is low
> 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 never once had any trouble, while people in their trucks and 4x4s were stuck on the side of the road due to all-season tires. A true snow tire is a whole different level.
> Northern California ... chain controls
The whole California chain thing is brain damage. The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.
A car with Hakkapeliittas (Blizzaks are good too) will outhandle a car with chains 100% of the time.
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 Southern California, and all the state cares about is air condition efficiency and water usage, as though everyone lives in the desert.
> 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.
You’re dangerously wrong. Winter tires make a very large difference in braking. If they’re so inconsequential, why are they mandatory in many northern places?
Culture has an impact on what people choose to do. I’ve seen so many Americans with your point of view. It’s maddening. Winter tires save lives!
It depends. I use All Seasons in winter and have for over 40 years without issue because 9 years out of ten winter weather means 0.25” of snow one night during winter. The tenth year we might have three inches over a couple of days.
I have some 3PMS all season tires: Michelin Crossclimate 2. So far seem to be doing well on my FWD Chevy Bolt EV. I live in Boston though and we don't often get enough snow to really need snow tires. Also I usually ride my bike when it's snowy instead of driving.
Montana here. Everyone that can afford to changes their tires. Costco tire center is a s.show in November and May. Nobody uses chains except for un-maintained roads. Obviously nobody buys a 2WD vehicle here.
You’re right usually (about not needing blizzaks) but there’s important nuance here. There are warm all season (with usual M+S stamped on, this just means tread pattern, nothing about compound) and winter all-season with a compatible compound for cold conditions. The industry created a logo for the tires some years back it’s like 3 peak mountain snowflake or something. This ensures the compound is soft enough to keep gripping in freezing temperatures. It’s required in some jurisdictions (Quebec I think and maybe some lake effect zones)
There is lot of variation between tires. From summer, to all season, to European winter to Nordic winter(studdles or studded). Only Nordic ones designed specifically for snow and ice are really usable in conditions where there is often snow and ice. They fare worse in wet not freezing conditions and ofc in dry.
I only trust studded tiers (but i live close to a non-paved road that is always very icy during the end of the season).
But that said - there are lots of research that points towards that studded tires kill more people than they save lives because of the asphalt particles they cause.
But then there are people that claim that non-studded cars rely on at least 10% cars with studded tires to make the surface more rugged/rough.
Following an ambulance a couple years back I was up to 110 mph on my rather aggressive snow tires and was just fine. Not to say it wasn't a little worse, but I was fine. Everything you're saying is an exaggeration. A whole lot of people in snowy areas don't drive with snow tires and are usually fine. Good snow tires are a bit of a superpower up north but we all learn how to drive without them being a requirement outside of times where traveling at all is questionable.
Difference is pretty big if it’s icy like breaking 100 meters vs 10 meters. Especially if there’s wildlife like reindeers/moose’s you are going to do emergency breathing semi regularly.
I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".
I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)
None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.
Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
Yes, there are. And they show that it's a trade-off well worth investigating. Do you really want 10% better performance on snow at the cost of 10% worse performance on tarmac?
How much do you drive on snow anyway? Probably nowhere near as long as you do on tarmac, even in a tough winter.
Just pointing out - a lot of snowy areas are very aggressive about plowing (and salting). For most people this is probably like "don't drive tomorrow" and not some need for knobby snow tires.
Even when the road is dry the rubber compound is a lot softer on winter tires so you get significantly more grip than all season or summer in cold temps when they get hard.
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 summer wear at the cost of the winter low temp performance. You can’t have it both ways, a long wearing summer performance and good sub 40 degree grip.
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.
It's significantly easier. I used to do this in the CA drought where I would fill a bucket when waiting for the shower / sink to get hot, and then use the bucket to fill the toilet after I flushed it.
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.
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.
I've lived all my life in Finland, even though all through my early adulthood I was planning to move to some place much warmer. But later (especially now with children for whom the snow is so exciting) I've come to like the four seasons and the balance it gives.
That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
> That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
Seems like the author lives in a rural area where there isn't the support to deal with heavy snow. Also, Finland has frequent snow that falls in small amounts. I'm not sure exactly where the author is, but some mountainous or lake-adjacent areas in the US and Canada the snow falls less frequently but when it does it can come very heavy, like a meter of the stuff in 48 hours is not uncommon which is more than Helsinki usually gets in an entire winter. In Buffalo, NY for example a few years back they got 2 meters in a single day.
Yes but then in spring come the freeze-thaw cycles that make every town a skating rink. Sand & grit barely rate as halfway measures. More-aggressive snow removal and pavement scraping would help.
I've been obsessed longtime about how (or, better: whether) robots could remove the ice from pavements, but I only see tech challenge after tech challenge.
Just before the Superbowl, the Boston Globe had an article full of interviews with New Englanders who have moved to California. One claimed to still be a New Englander but didn't miss the weather, "I haven't slipped on ice in 30 years". I had to think, are they really New Englanders if they can't handle the weather? I think that's a big part of it. Having some Patriots and Dunkin Donuts swag doesn't cut it IMO.
Yeah it is basically don't walk outside much when above 35C. Unless you are a weird person with a body that can handle a 10km run in such conditions! Not me.
While talking about Norwegian ways to keep warm in winter you can't forget their wool underwear (ullundertøy), which is not underwear (but is often made of wool).
It's a set of pants and a long sleeve, worn right on your underwear/body. It greatly improves your heat comfort in winter, which I quickly learned the first time out of town in cold with Norwegians. They take it as a given that everyone owns a set.
There's also a hi tech version called superundertøy, which is good at channeling sweat away from body in addition to keeping you warm.
Ullundertøy is very warm. I haven't put mine on yet this winter (only using regular long johns), as temperatures haven't fallen below -15*C yet (and it's been coldest winter so far this decade). But I'd wear it if going outside for longer and planning on staying stationary.
A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?
I live in the back woods of Canada. We get a lot of snow. Our electrical supply (we call it "hydro") can disappear for long periods of time. The usual suspects are:
1. Ice storms. 3 inches (8 cm) of ice build up on trees can cause them to either drop limbs or deadfall into wires. It can be spectacular to see. Sparky.
2. The first heavy snowfall of the year can cause problems because although trees are trimmed every few years, they can grow pretty fast and either arch over the wires or are now tall enough to deadfall on the wires. By the time the later heavy snowfalls have come the danger trees have already dangered. The worst trees for this are the pines and spruces (and hemlocks and cedars but don't tend to grow as tall) since their boughs catch the snow and their new wood is actually pretty weak.
3. Drivers losing control. Doing 20 over the posted limit and passing a plow while the roads are greasy and visibility poor often results in taking out one or more poles while converting yourself into a casualty.
One large factor here is not that it takes a crew long to restore the lines, it's that the problems tend to occur in many sports over a large geographic region. There are only so many crews on shift and more remote places can be forced to wait for days while the townies get services right away. Our power was off one spring for three weeks a few years back after a derecho passed through a strip about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. I'm still burning the wood for heat.
So, yeah, it's normal. Doesn't matter how good your make your infrastructure, nature is harsher.
Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.
It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.
I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.
I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.
I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.
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.
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.
Makes them a lot easier to get to. Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
A lineman can fix anything on a pole within a few hours. Probably before lunch if they start first thing in the AM. Fixing a buried line can take days or worse depending on what's above it.
> Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
Or if you want to upgrade it. My local electricity provider charges an order of magnitude more for upgrading home electrical service for more amperage if your service line is buried.
I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.
Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.
I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.
Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.
Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.
I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.
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.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
That's fine, humor is subjective. I had a similar experience watching the "manchild" music video recently. I knew it wasn't serious, but I was still annoyed until I thought it through and understood the satire.
Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.
This is about _tankless_ toilets. They only work with electricity-powered flush pumps. That's why the author wrote about having to physically dump water into the toilet to flush it.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
Most well pumps are electric powered. The holding tank will give you a very small amount of water that’s in it if it’s up high but after that without electricity it won’t refill.
In the USA most residential toilets are tank type and don’t directly use electricity.
I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.
You should have a shutoff valve on every pipe that goes through an external wall. Before bitter cold like that, turn off the valve and drain that pipe. If it is supplying an outdoor spigot, that shutoff should just be part of your winter prep.
I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.
This is very true whether the source of the water is outside or inside your clothing.
Unfortunately, this warning is immediately preceded by the recommendation that you should use rain-gear in winter. A lot of rain gear is very lacking in breathability. If you go out and do something physical in raingear, you will likely wind up drenched in sweat. i.e. Wet. The moment you stop being physical, you will get cold. i.e. Cold and wet. This is a recipe for hypothermia.
Here's a lifehack my dad taught me.
If you have cold feet and no way to warm them - stuff some newspaper (or any kind of paper really) in your boots or socks. Most of the cold comes from moisture and paper is incredibly good at sucking it all up. The difference is huge and instant .
I feel like this trick has saved me from catching a cold on quite a few occassions.
This advice was also given to me if I ever get caught in the rain while camping and soak my shoes.
Bring some newspaper for both a firestarter and for leaving in your shoes overnight, and wake up to dry shoes!
I've found used snowboarding gear is best for when you need to muck around in the snow.
Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.
Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.
Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.
When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.
Or get a snow blower.
If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.
Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.
19 - why not just dump water into the tank and flush like normal? Dumping water into the bowl directly is just more complex than letting the existing lever do it.
Part of this isn't just relevant for "heavy snow" places but also for rear emergency situations you anyway should be prepared for.
This winter we had a power hick up _and then_ a multi day power outage.
> You have a lot of batteries, flashlights, shelf stable food, warm clothes, and drinking water stored, right? Good.
I hadn't. Luckily the power outage was quite local so I could take a bus for ~30min to get to some shops, including ones with flashlights.
Also no propane heater or similar, you don't expect to need it where I live. I would have loved having had it even if just for a bit.
I also had a 1kWh battery.
But some annoying surprise:
- 1kWh is a bad size, to big (but still possible) to nice by food carry somewhere where you can recharge it but too small to use it for a lot of things
- Turns out even if you blanked is theoretically insulating enough to handle very cold temperatures, if it's cooled down, you bed is cooled down, and you yourself are cooled down you need quite a time to warm it up with body head. Doesn't matter that it can handle the temperature or having very warm clothes it will be a huge pain. Having some way (e.g. heat blanked run by battery) to slightly heat up your blanked _before_ you enter it makes an enormous difference when sleeping at ~10C.
- In general learn about winter camping tips they help you if you need to bridge 1-2 days in a very cold apartment. Also having a winter camping sleeping bag can be nice.
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The 3rd point is just general good advice, at least skim the manual it might have surprisingly important things in it. And sometimes random but useful tips.
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> build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher
fun fact: this is how glaciers are formed, from non melting snow fall pilling up over years and by wight compressing the snow to ice
The most recent thing I've learned after a lifetime in the Midwest US: There's nothing like the 'Snow Wonder Snow Scoop'[1] for moving snow manually.
Someone left theirs at my wife's previous home and she's kept it since. I don't get sore after shoveling anymore. I have a snow blower but only use it when there's more than 6" on the ground.
I've tried other "push sled" style scoops and none of them work this well (and weigh so little).
We had a house growing up in Alaska with a steep pitch, and our Dad would get us in trouble for parking the car "too close" to the threshold of the house where the the accumulated snow on the roof could slide of and pound anything in its path.
One day sitting at the dinner table, we heard a giant slide and heard it smash onto the car, and fortunately we found the car keys in my Dad's jacket that night.
Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
> Even if your house technically runs on propane, and you have propane, electricity might still run the propane, so your house is going to get cold. Unless you run the woodstove. Which you will
Corollary: don’t buy a house in a place where it snows without two fully independent sources of heat. You want backups. There’s a reason why woodstoves are so popular in New England. A millivolt gas log stove on a thermostat can also be a good alternative.
It can also be structural. Depending on the elevation, my county mandates houses be designed to survive wind speeds up to 157 miles per hour and snow loads up to 545 pounds per square foot. That means a flat roof would have to be built like a parking garage floor, but a sloped roof can transfer that weight to the exterior walls, and an true A-frame directly transfers the load to the ground.
One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.
I suspect most places that experience regular heavy snow, deal well with it.
I have a friend that went to school in Buffalo, NY. That’s a city that experiences “lake effect” snow, during the winter.
He says all the sidewalks are basically “snow gorges,” but the roads clear quickly, and everyone knows how to dress for the cold.
He tells me a story about visiting northern Quebec, one summer, and seeing houses with a second front door, set on the second floor, and was told they were “snow doors,” for deep winter, so folks can get out, when the snow gets deep.
One thing i keep saying over and over, and few believe me, unless they know from experience - is that winters in Chicago are actually significantly more miserable than Minneapolis, where I went to college.
Minneapolis winters are so cold that everything is dry as a bone, so the cold doesn't 'stick' the same way - Chicago winters sit mostly in the 20-40 range where it's both wet and cold (often raining at a balmy 34-38F), and it's much much more immiserating to be outside.
> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
A fun one I only learned recently in spite of having lived with snow all my life: while propane doesn't go liquid until around -80F, the oil pan in the generator needs help somewhere before -40F (and actually that was the wind chill, so it was probably only -20F or so). Thankfully we do have woodstoves, plural.
Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts.
I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.
I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
I see a lot of people saying "We never lose power, what are you talking about?"
I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.
I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.
For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
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.
Beautiful, living in Southern Michigan and dealing with slightly more snow than usual this year, I feel like a wimp compared to some of my snowy-weather compatriots here from Norway, Canada, etc.
> If the power’s been off for a while, like, over 24 hours, and then suddenly it comes back on for a few minutes, and then it immediately goes out again
This is probably because the average idiot neglects to unplug motors (refrigerator, and other inductive loads), bringing down the network again, entirely unnecessarily.
I really do hate throwing shade on someone's article, but this reads like one of those "Pearls of Wisdom from Two Years of Junior-Level Software Development". Thanks, person who just a few months ago moved to a snowy, remote area with poor infrastructure, but this is NOT how you flush a toilet with no running water:
"Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl as fast as possible."
No, ya dork, you fill the tank then flush. There were a few other pearls, but no need to pile on. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or perhaps is put off the idea of moving to rustic, romanticized places when they'd be better off elsewhere.
It’s been a while since I had to operate a toilet without water service but what they described only works for the first flush since the tank would be full. After that, the tank is empty and after you fill the bowl, with the tank still empty, there will be barely any gravity assisted flow to “flush”. Makes me think they’ve actually never been in that situation.
I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.
I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.
The math there gets pretty bad pretty fast. A cubic foot of snow represents ~15 lbs of ice. That corresponds to at 144 BTU to melt a lb of ice, that means you need at a minimum 2160 BTU of fuel (assuming 100% of your heat goes to melting the snow). A gallon of gasoline represents about 114,000 BTU, so each gallon of gas could clear, in a best case scenario where you can capture 100% of the heat, only 50 cubic feet of snow. That's a 10-foot by 10-foot area covered in 6 inches of snow.
But even that's in the dream scenario where somehow your snow is in a sealed, insulated space. In the real world, snow tends to be outside, in the cold air, which is very eager to sink and replace any hot air you make at ground level. So you're losing any heat that warms the air at all. And all that air in the snow makes it a fantastic insulator, meaning the vast majority of your heat isn't going to penetrate.
Interestingly, this same phenomena makes melting snow from underneath much more effective (as the great insulating snow captures the heat). You still need to grapple with the kinda nuts amount of energy it takes to melt ice, but at least you're not wasting 90% of it.
those handheld propane torches, oft used for weedburning on asphault/concrete, are very good for clearing "post snow clean up ice patches, IE tire treads that iced over, foot prints.
Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane
xkcd explored this question. too fuel-inefficient to be practical. much better to use that same fuel to run a giant snowblower (and move the snow rather than melt it).
Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.
Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I think the bigger problem is that many of the tourists don't normally spend time outside, so they are used to only having enough gear for a heated building or car, even at home.
I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.
Regarding 5, the colder it is, the quicker the snow will settle and become hard to shovel by hand. Not like when it thaws and refreezes, but if it is -25 C you'll want to move most of it while it is falling or shortly after. It is likely the snow particles are very small and it will become very dense if allowed to sit for a while.
Regarding 6, you can't shovel snow fast. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Don't use a regular shovel, there are sled-like contraptions that allow you to push the snow around on the ground and that will allow you to bring it further with less effort. Dress appropriately, you don't want to become too sweaty and you are going to figure out an equilibrium where your heat and sweat production stabilises your temperature, or you're going to have to take breaks and on average get less done per unit time.
Regarding 9, if you don't have an axe, get one. In harsh conditions tools are what keep you alive and things like axes and knives are part of the basic equipment you need to have and take good care of. You do not split the wood indoors, do not bring it indoors unless it is split in small enough parts that lighting it will be easy.
Also, you should really avoid using wood that hasn't had good shelter up until time of use. Moist wood will add a lot of soot to your chimney and you are likely not able to clear it yourself, meaning that you run the risk of a chimney fire.
I'll add this - for the love of God, please brush the snow off your car before you drive, especially after a storm.
If it gets above freezing during the day and freezes again at night, the snow will go through a melt/freeze cycle to become a nice thick sheet of ice. I don't know how many times I've seen a 3 inch sheet of ice go flying off a car traveling 70 mph on the Garden State Parkway. This is common sense and it's infuriating how brain dead people are about this. Incidents have killed people before.
Thankfully I've also seen NJ State Troopers hand out tickets for this. I now live in a state, Washington, where the politicians are too busy grandstanding on stupid issues while ice sheets go flying at cars around on the freeway after a snowstorm.
> 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).
Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
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.
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. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.
Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.
Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.
PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.
> 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.)
You'll even find ubiquitous A-frames in Southern California in mountain ranges. Crestline, Arrowhead, Big Bear, etc.
A-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.
Depends what you are optimizing for -- roof collapse in a high snow load local or the level of efficiency for thermal properties. You can drive for high efficiency of your thermal properties but when your roof collapses those efficiencies are meaningless.
Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
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
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.
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.
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 need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
I love visiting, but I'll never live there!
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?
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 Ranier, 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.
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.
Why not "just" make a weaker roof steeper?
imagine finding this painful to read because it doesn't describe your world
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 invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.
> 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 live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.
People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.
Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.
I've lived 40+ years in several places in the northern US, mostly in rural areas and this isn't my experience at all.
> In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area.
Not just outside, I spent 15 years in/around Austin and it got to be ridiculous.
2020 - cleared out the stores at covid.. alright, few people were prepared, none had done it before
2021 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for 45min and water for 5 days.. almost no one was prepared, despite the year before
2023 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for days due to heavy icing.. some were prepared but not at scale
Some people just don't learn.
Luckily after '20, we prepared. Then in '21, we moved to rural Texas and got solar+battery backup so 2023 wasn't even a blip.
Even in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked...
That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
I had a Russian friend tell me that the Soviet mindset was to overbuild.
He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.
If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.
I am in Honolulu right now and the power has gone out twice in the last three days because of high winds.
Or somewhere remote. Czechia is a small country with a well-developed grid and nothing here is really "remote" compared to, say, Alaska.
But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.
It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
Likely city vs rural.
Parts of Ottawa, Canada were without power for 10+ days after a windstorm in 2022. Not rural, but the suburbs.
> Ottawa Hydro restored power to just over half its customers after one week
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho
Fortunately, you can't freeze to death in May, and the roads are clear so you just go to where the power is.
Also live in Norway, nord Trøndelag. Power went out 3 timeslast year, few times for days, but that was an unusual winter. This years it’s only gone out for a few hours.
Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.
ironically sometimes warmer winters are worse
like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C then a warmer winter would have
- more black ice
- more ice rain
- more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.)
- wetter snow (so heavier)
etc.
Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.
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.
Unfortunately that won't always save you. One of my clients spent a pretty long time unpowered because some creek bed froze (why did they bury thru a creek bed???). When I called for followup they advised me that the truck they sent to remediate had its hydraulics freeze so there was an additional delay.
Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.
Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
Hey Vi burde alle chat litt. Vi bor jo alle litt i nærheten.
It's pretty much a "countries with bad infrastructure" problem.
But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.
Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).
I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
"she'll be right" =/= "it's gonna be fine"
More of a it's not going to be fine but we will deal with it.
1000+KMs away in/not far from the capital city of Queensland it's not unheard of to have a multi-day power outage after a severe storm.
Considering QLD is almost 6x the size of Norway it's not actually that bad.
Worth keeping in mind that nobody freezes to death in FNQ if the power goes out.
A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.
Canada here, and it's gone out in winter. Not normal during snow storm but very common during ice storms.
Might be all of that infrastructure paid by oil, on the other side of the border in a not that remote of an area (10people/km²). We have absolutely had power outages lasting several days.
Snow isn't inherently the villain; mediocre infrastructure is
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Midwest (where it snows plenty), and our electricity came from a rural co-op ("rural co-ops", because no one else is going to drag electrical wires out here, so we'll do it ourselves). We rarely lost power, the infrastructure where the TFA author lives just sucks.
living in New England, I have also never heard of this and I don't think it's understandable at all. Trees are pruned around power lines for a reason.
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.
Oof, you just reminded me of the Ice Storm of '98.
I can still hear all the trees just exploding. It was wild.
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.
Couple of tail-ends of hurricanes in summer offlined a big chunk of Massachusetts when I was living there. Likely one of those?
come up to maine and see how much pruning the power companies do. there's a reason high wind and heavy snow storms trash power lines
As an adolescent in Fayette (Maine), I had great fun helping out our neighbors with summertime tree-pruning parties. FWIW we had few power issues during winter, and our winters frequently featured 4-6 feet of snow cover.
Multiple day outages in Winter are not unusual in our part of Maine. Nearly everyone has a whole home generator for good reason.
Yeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.
Rural-ish Michigan here. It doesn't happen most years, and almost never in winter, but it can. It seems to happen a lot less than when I was a kid.
Regardless, "my power never goes out" isn't a great plan for what to do if your power goes out. Ask Texas, they once thought the same.
As much as a bunch of people on HN want to attribute this to European superiority or tax rate or investment or whatever, it's not. It's just a willingness to maintain things and not let idiots with no real problems roadblock the process.
I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.
My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.
I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.
I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.
growing up in chicagoland when it snowed blizzard level often with lots of accumulation (70s, 80s), the power never went off, to your point also.
Losing power is highly correlated with above-ground power lines. Who'd a thunk that.
and wildfires, see PG&E in CA.
they're expecting to spend 10B burying lines in the mountains.
New england is pretty much one big rock garden/shelf where you're not digging through soil in alot of places but rock ledges.
https://satwcomic.com/you-re-hot-then-you-re-cold
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
Norway is probably one of the better managed countries on earth
I like it, but your statement is an generalisation.
Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.
In the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.
In Sweden it also almost never happens but this year there was a hurricane like storm that fell lots of trees and thousands of people had no power for days. But yeah it wasn’t because of snow.
> In Sweden it also almost never happens
This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance:
https://www.horisontmagasin.se/2026/01/06/nya-elavbrott-nu-p...
Parts of Finland, too. Few people lost power for a long time. I didn't even notice. Depends on how many things break and where.
We have above ground power lines in the nordics too. They are just built to handle our climate.
Where I live (pacific northwest), it's not snow that's the problem, but windstorms. Presumably knocking over trees, which in turn takes down power lines - which of course implies said trees are tall, in proximity to the power lines, and not cut down. I maybe average 24 hours of outage per year (frequently less, but occasionally spiking to a multi-day outage.)
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
Yeah, it was interesting to see some above-ground-to-the-premises power delivery in some of the smaller Norwegian villages above the arctic circle. Things looked rather robust, though.
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
or might find SOMEONE ELSE stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown.
yes, obviously "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" (so you remain an asset instead of a liability), but please remember the "helping others" part (so you remain an asset instead of a liability).
how?
My parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines.
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
Underground power lines are weirdly vulnerable to lightning strikes.
I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated.
This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw.
Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
My neighborhood has underground power lines and we lose power every time there is a hurricane/tropical storm or even a major thunderstorm.
I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
That is bad infrastructure problem. Not a necessary feature. Near freezing should be non issue.
We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.
How does that compare to Norway?
This is largely true in places with above ground power lines, like the US. I happen to live in an area with buried lines and have never actually lost power due to snow.
In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
Even a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.
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 below freezing, that snow stays on the ground. It doesn't melt. The city can move it to more convenient locations, and a very few rich cities have snow melting machines, but most cities don't. Its obvious when you think about it, but if all you're used to is rain its not trivially obvious: The grand snow strategy of most municipalities is "hope it gets warm soon".
This is an interesting way to frame it, but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?
The other main ways you lose snow are: sublimation, wind blowing it elsewhere, compaction, and getting dirty (darker color helps it melt in the sun). All of these are relevant for other cities in the snow.
> but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?
this is how glaciers are created
snow getting stuck up, not melting, compressing by weight into much much smaller ice and then more stacking up. And during the last ice age this repeating for a very long time (because snow is mostly air, so the amount of ice you get from it is very little).
The reasons why this isn't too big of an issue on the north/south pool, Antarctica etc. is because this places are also very dry/don't have a lot of snow fall.
To have snowfall you need water in the air. Which mostly comes from heat evaporating water. This doesn't happen in non stop freezing cold places.
So the wind needs to carry the wet air over.
But there is a gradient between hot wet air places and very cold places. So a lot of water rains or snows off before reaching the places where snow doesn't melt.
A large part of the south pool is technically a desert as it has hardly any _new_ snow fall. Just a lot of years old snow getting moved around by wind.
It does, see: Antarctica
Compaction doesn't lose snow. It loses air. This causes the pile of snow to shorten.
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:
24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68
How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc
How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHbsYYELV94
Living in a place that often drops down to insane temps, I am also obsessed with watching the YouTubes from there.
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
It really is something.
Of course, large commercial kitchens often have walk-in refrigerators and walk-in freezers.
In Yakutsk, you have an open-air walk-out freezer.
There are a few months in the summer when temperatures are similar to the Bay Area. I could probably wear my usual aloha shirts!
Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
> thick gloves
Gloves are not for severe cold. They are for dexterity during limited exposure time - as no gloves can keep your fingers warm for very long no matter how well-made they are.
Look for mittens or "choppers" as we called them back in the day if you are going to be outside for a long period of time. These are outer shells (leather or gore-tex/etc.) with various types of removable liners. You basically layer your hands inside them. For folks outside all day you usually would have a few liners on hand to replace when they get wet.
Add a heat pack (iron oxide) to these on those super cold days and you'll be pretty much set.
A big thing I would add is to strongly consider how much you'll be moving, especially when it comes to footwear.
Boots that are rated to -40 during light activity can leave you with cold toes if you're standing still in -10 for an hour.
Activity levels also dictate how you layer and how easily you need to dump heat. If you're hiking, snowshoeing, XC skiing, you want some layers with zips so you can quickly let heat out.
This guy has mastered the art of dressing for winter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG3WfCWU9D0
A buff works pretty well instead of a balaclava and can serve the same purpose and more. Essentially just a tube of stretchy fabric that you can wear around your neck and pull up into a close enough approximation of a balaclava.
Also remember to watch your sweat levels. As soon as you start sweating, start shedding layers to bring your core temp down.
Get boots a size too big to wear multiple layers of wool socks.
> battery-heated versions
all the ones I've seen when researching were lithium-ion from sketchy-looking brands, any brands you recommend?
Any sold at a physical ski shop. You will make a face at the price. You will reconsider the sketchy ones for their price. But the ski shop ones will last significantly longer.
Any recommendations about the boots? Or what to check for?
The key word you’re looking for is a "pac boot" depending on where you live you can get insulated, but honestly unless your live somewhere super cold and snowy, you probably don't need insulation. if you put on warm socks, keep snow out of them, are moving around, and aren't outside for hours on end you'll probably be fine even in really cold weather.
Ryan Tilley (an AMGA-certified mountain guide) has a long and detailed guide of different sorts of boots and what to look for in each type[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFKC0BynjxY
Baffin make some of the best cold weather boots. We use them in Antarctica, though you probably don't want the chonky -70C rated ones. I have some lighter boots rated for about -40 and they're great. Really any good gore tex mid-ankle hiking boot is probably fine. Whether you need cold rated boots is going to depend on where you're walking.
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
There are many brands making proper shoes/boots for winter hiking. I would recommend taking a look at Haix, Lowa, Salomon Quest series, Lundhags and Meindl.
I prefer military boots, they have no branding and are typically designed and tested for decent longevity and comfort. My current ones are Bundeswehr surplus, I believe Meindl produced them. They cost about 60 euros or so, never been used.
Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.
You can certainly get cheap Bundeswehr surplus boots, but you should know that soldiers don’t typically choose those if given a choice.
When given a choice, soldiers will tend to choose something like Salomon Toundra.
Yeah, I know, I've been in the military, but my requirements are much simpler. I'm not going to walk fifty to seventy kilometers per day in them, and I also don't want to spend as much time taking care of my boots as they do. If I happen to walk through a bog too many and the stench gets permanent it feels better to get a replacement pair if they cost like 60 euros rather than 2-300.
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 find it quite funny. I read it as if he is obnoxious towards himself, because the lessons presented are learned the hard way.
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 vehicle)
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.
I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/12/01/all-wheel-drive-d...
FTA:
"If anyone gets an AWD vehicle “for safety” but uses it with all-season tires, they have performed a Consumer Sucka Fail. A front wheel drive vehicle with snow tires would have more grip.
According to this Consumer Reports test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXjzYbpt9Ow) on snow tires vs. AWD, the tires were by far the most important factor. And only 12% of AWD vehicle owners bothered to put snow tires on their vehicle, meaning 88% of all-wheel-drive vehicle purchases were wasted, because the drivers could have achieved better performance at lower cost in a front-wheeler with snow tires."
> 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.
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.
As others have said, this is very wrong. I live in Vermont an Duse "all season" tires as my summer tires on both my Subaru and my 4wd truck. I absolutely change to winter tires on both vehicles (studded, on the truck), and the difference in snowy conditions is night and day.
Interesting, here in Sweden it’s mandatory to change tires. Once I did it a bit late and drove on some ice, just a little. The car was like on ice skates for a little while .
Driving discipline, culture, and rules in North America are Mickey Mouse.
The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …
The United States also covers a vast difference in climate. What good are snow tires for people in South Florida, or Texas, or New Mexico? Where I live I switch between summer and all season cause we get enough snow to justify snow tires once a decade for a couple of days. This year has been the worse with two weekends with a decent amount of snow that was cleaned off the roads by Tuesday.
I wonder if it's a carryover of an old regulation that used to make sense. Modern all-season tires are better in snow than the best winter tires were several decades ago.
Also, you need studs or chains to get traction on ice. The difference between a winter tire and a summer tire is the temperature range where the rubber stays flexible. When the rubber gets hard, it will keep its shape instead of complying with the surface of the road, so it loses traction quicker. Ice is flat, so there's no difference between tire types, and there's nothing to grip on to.
Nordic studless winter tires (different from Central European winter tires so also probably different from whatever you get in the US) do give some grip on ice, while all-seasons can be nearly as bad as summer tires. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
The government has done ongoing research on these subjects and the regulations do get renewed (e.g. some properly rated all-seasons are now allowed)
Piggdekk in Norway are equivalent to North American studded tires. When I lived in the northern parts of the U.S., I had a set of these for times around freezing rains.
Beyond the questions of winter weather properties, there are adjacent tradeoffs between the tire types (outside of studded):
1. Fuel economy
2. Noise
3. Degree of particulate pollution emission
I'm sure that the all-season tires probably have some negative tradeoffs in these regards to, which yields a choose the most optimal product for the time of year. All-season tires to me seem like a convenience food for places where the weather can be legitimately bad.
One other difference that is hard to articulate to North American drivers with respect to understanding Scandinavia and roads: there are places where snow and ice will literally not be removed (maybe not even removeable) from the road when plowed (I presume until spring melt). It just becomes a thick ice pack over the course of weeks. I never encountered any roads in my life (including Northern Minnesota) that were this inclement. North American roads tend to be cleared (plowing or melting) to asphalt or pavement.
All-season tires aren't simply a matter of convenience, they offer a safety benefit. If you aren't driving at normal highway speeds, even if it's the dead of winter and the air is below freezing, your tires will heat up and the winter tires won't have as much traction. The disadvantage on dry roads can be several times what the advantage was on contaminated roads, including during the winter.
I've also seen snow tires perform worse than all-season tires, e.g: https://www.tyrereviews.com/Tyre/Michelin/CrossClimate-2.htm vs https://www.tyrereviews.com/Tyre/Barum/Polaris-5.htm
If tires complying with the standards overlap, then the standards are meaningless. When there's requirements for snow tires, but not for X brand or model of snow tire, than it's not doing any good. That's why it's important to have a snow rating that can apply to tires of any type, and if it meets that rating, regardless of the rating for dry warm weather, than it should be good to go, otherwise not.
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.
All-wheel drive doesn't help you at all where it is most important, and that is in braking. Having all-wheel drive only helps you get up to a dangerous speed faster when the grip is low
> 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 never once had any trouble, while people in their trucks and 4x4s were stuck on the side of the road due to all-season tires. A true snow tire is a whole different level.
> Northern California ... chain controls
The whole California chain thing is brain damage. The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.
A car with Hakkapeliittas (Blizzaks are good too) will outhandle a car with chains 100% of the time.
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 Southern California, and all the state cares about is air condition efficiency and water usage, as though everyone lives in the desert.
> 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.
You’re dangerously wrong. Winter tires make a very large difference in braking. If they’re so inconsequential, why are they mandatory in many northern places?
Culture has an impact on what people choose to do. I’ve seen so many Americans with your point of view. It’s maddening. Winter tires save lives!
All-season tires are not winter rated. They are 3.5 season at best. True winter usage only exists in all-weather or snow tires with the 3PMS symbols.
It depends. I use All Seasons in winter and have for over 40 years without issue because 9 years out of ten winter weather means 0.25” of snow one night during winter. The tenth year we might have three inches over a couple of days.
I have some 3PMS all season tires: Michelin Crossclimate 2. So far seem to be doing well on my FWD Chevy Bolt EV. I live in Boston though and we don't often get enough snow to really need snow tires. Also I usually ride my bike when it's snowy instead of driving.
Montana here. Everyone that can afford to changes their tires. Costco tire center is a s.show in November and May. Nobody uses chains except for un-maintained roads. Obviously nobody buys a 2WD vehicle here.
No, the rubber compound in winter tires are vastly superior to all seasons on snow/ice, it helps you actually control the vehicle.
I’ve shoveled meters of snowfall this year, our roads are just packed down snow, no pavement.
The writing tone is obviously self-deprecating.
Around this parts of Europe, they are mandatory.
Eh, all seasons do you just fine. Not worth the effort to put winter tires on, imo.
You’re right usually (about not needing blizzaks) but there’s important nuance here. There are warm all season (with usual M+S stamped on, this just means tread pattern, nothing about compound) and winter all-season with a compatible compound for cold conditions. The industry created a logo for the tires some years back it’s like 3 peak mountain snowflake or something. This ensures the compound is soft enough to keep gripping in freezing temperatures. It’s required in some jurisdictions (Quebec I think and maybe some lake effect zones)
There is lot of variation between tires. From summer, to all season, to European winter to Nordic winter(studdles or studded). Only Nordic ones designed specifically for snow and ice are really usable in conditions where there is often snow and ice. They fare worse in wet not freezing conditions and ofc in dry.
But not all winter tires are made equivalent.
I only trust studded tiers (but i live close to a non-paved road that is always very icy during the end of the season).
But that said - there are lots of research that points towards that studded tires kill more people than they save lives because of the asphalt particles they cause.
But then there are people that claim that non-studded cars rely on at least 10% cars with studded tires to make the surface more rugged/rough.
Anyway, down the rabbit hole.
Following an ambulance a couple years back I was up to 110 mph on my rather aggressive snow tires and was just fine. Not to say it wasn't a little worse, but I was fine. Everything you're saying is an exaggeration. A whole lot of people in snowy areas don't drive with snow tires and are usually fine. Good snow tires are a bit of a superpower up north but we all learn how to drive without them being a requirement outside of times where traveling at all is questionable.
Difference is pretty big if it’s icy like breaking 100 meters vs 10 meters. Especially if there’s wildlife like reindeers/moose’s you are going to do emergency breathing semi regularly.
If it's icy there's no difference at all. The only tyres that do anything on ice are the ones with spikes or chains.
If it's snowy a good modern all weather tyre can hold its own, but will brake a few feet later than a good winter tyre.
In all other conditions a good all weather is a lot better than winter tyres, and pretty close to a good summer tyre.
I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".
I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)
None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.
Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
There are also actual studies that show the difference https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
Yes, there are. And they show that it's a trade-off well worth investigating. Do you really want 10% better performance on snow at the cost of 10% worse performance on tarmac?
How much do you drive on snow anyway? Probably nowhere near as long as you do on tarmac, even in a tough winter.
You must live in Florida or be a terrible driver. The difference between winter and all seasons is very apparent.
Just pointing out - a lot of snowy areas are very aggressive about plowing (and salting). For most people this is probably like "don't drive tomorrow" and not some need for knobby snow tires.
Even when the road is dry the rubber compound is a lot softer on winter tires so you get significantly more grip than all season or summer in cold temps when they get hard.
It is.
However the difference between winter and a modern all weather (it's a different class) isn't.
And yes, we're probably terrible drivers.
I do not live in Florida. 45N, continental winters.
I'm never using winter tyres again unless society breaks down and no one shovels the roads anymore.
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 summer wear at the cost of the winter low temp performance. You can’t have it both ways, a long wearing summer performance and good sub 40 degree grip.
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.
The other way to flush a toilet without running water is to fill the tank of the toilet with water, then flush it normally.
I have to 2nd this.
It's significantly easier. I used to do this in the CA drought where I would fill a bucket when waiting for the shower / sink to get hot, and then use the bucket to fill the toilet after I flushed it.
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.
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.
I've lived all my life in Finland, even though all through my early adulthood I was planning to move to some place much warmer. But later (especially now with children for whom the snow is so exciting) I've come to like the four seasons and the balance it gives.
That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
> That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
Seems like the author lives in a rural area where there isn't the support to deal with heavy snow. Also, Finland has frequent snow that falls in small amounts. I'm not sure exactly where the author is, but some mountainous or lake-adjacent areas in the US and Canada the snow falls less frequently but when it does it can come very heavy, like a meter of the stuff in 48 hours is not uncommon which is more than Helsinki usually gets in an entire winter. In Buffalo, NY for example a few years back they got 2 meters in a single day.
Yes but then in spring come the freeze-thaw cycles that make every town a skating rink. Sand & grit barely rate as halfway measures. More-aggressive snow removal and pavement scraping would help.
I've been obsessed longtime about how (or, better: whether) robots could remove the ice from pavements, but I only see tech challenge after tech challenge.
Just before the Superbowl, the Boston Globe had an article full of interviews with New Englanders who have moved to California. One claimed to still be a New Englander but didn't miss the weather, "I haven't slipped on ice in 30 years". I had to think, are they really New Englanders if they can't handle the weather? I think that's a big part of it. Having some Patriots and Dunkin Donuts swag doesn't cut it IMO.
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.
The remedy is swim or air conditioning.
I'd rather just not live somewhere hot and humid.
Swimming (where, by the way?) or air conditioning isn't helping when walking outside.
Yeah it is basically don't walk outside much when above 35C. Unless you are a weird person with a body that can handle a 10km run in such conditions! Not me.
+1 I grew up in CA, went to college in IL and couldn't move back fast enough!
I hate bugs, I specifically like late autumn/winter/early spring cold times because there are almost no bugs. I don't mind snow/ice as much.
While talking about Norwegian ways to keep warm in winter you can't forget their wool underwear (ullundertøy), which is not underwear (but is often made of wool).
It's a set of pants and a long sleeve, worn right on your underwear/body. It greatly improves your heat comfort in winter, which I quickly learned the first time out of town in cold with Norwegians. They take it as a given that everyone owns a set.
There's also a hi tech version called superundertøy, which is good at channeling sweat away from body in addition to keeping you warm.
Ullundertøy is very warm. I haven't put mine on yet this winter (only using regular long johns), as temperatures haven't fallen below -15*C yet (and it's been coldest winter so far this decade). But I'd wear it if going outside for longer and planning on staying stationary.
A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?
I live in the back woods of Canada. We get a lot of snow. Our electrical supply (we call it "hydro") can disappear for long periods of time. The usual suspects are:
1. Ice storms. 3 inches (8 cm) of ice build up on trees can cause them to either drop limbs or deadfall into wires. It can be spectacular to see. Sparky.
2. The first heavy snowfall of the year can cause problems because although trees are trimmed every few years, they can grow pretty fast and either arch over the wires or are now tall enough to deadfall on the wires. By the time the later heavy snowfalls have come the danger trees have already dangered. The worst trees for this are the pines and spruces (and hemlocks and cedars but don't tend to grow as tall) since their boughs catch the snow and their new wood is actually pretty weak.
3. Drivers losing control. Doing 20 over the posted limit and passing a plow while the roads are greasy and visibility poor often results in taking out one or more poles while converting yourself into a casualty.
One large factor here is not that it takes a crew long to restore the lines, it's that the problems tend to occur in many sports over a large geographic region. There are only so many crews on shift and more remote places can be forced to wait for days while the townies get services right away. Our power was off one spring for three weeks a few years back after a derecho passed through a strip about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. I'm still burning the wood for heat.
So, yeah, it's normal. Doesn't matter how good your make your infrastructure, nature is harsher.
Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.
It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.
I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.
I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.
I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.
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.
Makes them a lot easier to get to. Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
A lineman can fix anything on a pole within a few hours. Probably before lunch if they start first thing in the AM. Fixing a buried line can take days or worse depending on what's above it.
> Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
Or if you want to upgrade it. My local electricity provider charges an order of magnitude more for upgrading home electrical service for more amperage if your service line is buried.
Just to add, a lot of the midwestern USA is very swampy.
cost, it’s way more expensive to dig. more red tape.
I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.
Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.
I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.
Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.
> I live very near a hospital
Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.
I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.
If you can't drive anywhere, chances are the people who fix electricity grids will struggle too. And snow storms can fuck with infrastructure..
Less of an issue in areas where people do get around no matter the snowfall tho.
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.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
It's not really meant to be advice. It's the author's own experience, ironically written as if it were advice.
For example:
"You did bleach ten gallons of well water for long-term storage already earlier in the year, right? Good."
This is sarcasm, because the author did not do that.
Ah I see. That didn’t translate well for me. Maybe because the title primed me into thinking that this was meant to be helpful.
That's fine, humor is subjective. I had a similar experience watching the "manchild" music video recently. I knew it wasn't serious, but I was still annoyed until I thought it through and understood the satire.
It's obviously a self-depreciation/joke style.
There is some truth in it [that doesn't translate well over to some other part of the works]. It requires rather poor infrastructure to be present.
There has been snow for over 2 months here, with relatively low lows (-29C) but no issue like lack of electricity or water.
Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.
This is about _tankless_ toilets. They only work with electricity-powered flush pumps. That's why the author wrote about having to physically dump water into the toilet to flush it.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
Most well pumps are electric powered. The holding tank will give you a very small amount of water that’s in it if it’s up high but after that without electricity it won’t refill.
In the USA most residential toilets are tank type and don’t directly use electricity.
I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.
You should have a shutoff valve on every pipe that goes through an external wall. Before bitter cold like that, turn off the valve and drain that pipe. If it is supplying an outdoor spigot, that shutoff should just be part of your winter prep.
(And yes - I, too, learned that the hard way.)
The entire article is half-assed assumptions mixed with common sense. The only lesson is to prepare before the snow season arrives or suffer.
This is a common reaction to posts on the internet, including blogs and Hacker News comments.
I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.
>"Do NOT get wet and cold."
This is very true whether the source of the water is outside or inside your clothing.
Unfortunately, this warning is immediately preceded by the recommendation that you should use rain-gear in winter. A lot of rain gear is very lacking in breathability. If you go out and do something physical in raingear, you will likely wind up drenched in sweat. i.e. Wet. The moment you stop being physical, you will get cold. i.e. Cold and wet. This is a recipe for hypothermia.
Here's a lifehack my dad taught me. If you have cold feet and no way to warm them - stuff some newspaper (or any kind of paper really) in your boots or socks. Most of the cold comes from moisture and paper is incredibly good at sucking it all up. The difference is huge and instant .
I feel like this trick has saved me from catching a cold on quite a few occassions.
This advice was also given to me if I ever get caught in the rain while camping and soak my shoes. Bring some newspaper for both a firestarter and for leaving in your shoes overnight, and wake up to dry shoes!
Old-school winter hacks tend to be simple physics, not magic
If they turned out to be magic I'd be more surprised
I've found used snowboarding gear is best for when you need to muck around in the snow.
Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.
Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.
Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.
When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.
Or get a snow blower.
If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.
Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
Maybe some one walked up the steps with packed snow on their boot and it came loose on that step and then froze and was snowed on after.
Aliens. It is always the aliens. And they love to wear Martens.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
Ice on power lines. It's the freezing rain mix in just the right conditions that builds up ice on anything and takes down lines.
All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.
19 - why not just dump water into the tank and flush like normal? Dumping water into the bowl directly is just more complex than letting the existing lever do it.
Part of this isn't just relevant for "heavy snow" places but also for rear emergency situations you anyway should be prepared for.
This winter we had a power hick up _and then_ a multi day power outage.
> You have a lot of batteries, flashlights, shelf stable food, warm clothes, and drinking water stored, right? Good.
I hadn't. Luckily the power outage was quite local so I could take a bus for ~30min to get to some shops, including ones with flashlights.
Also no propane heater or similar, you don't expect to need it where I live. I would have loved having had it even if just for a bit.
I also had a 1kWh battery.
But some annoying surprise:
- 1kWh is a bad size, to big (but still possible) to nice by food carry somewhere where you can recharge it but too small to use it for a lot of things
- Turns out even if you blanked is theoretically insulating enough to handle very cold temperatures, if it's cooled down, you bed is cooled down, and you yourself are cooled down you need quite a time to warm it up with body head. Doesn't matter that it can handle the temperature or having very warm clothes it will be a huge pain. Having some way (e.g. heat blanked run by battery) to slightly heat up your blanked _before_ you enter it makes an enormous difference when sleeping at ~10C.
- In general learn about winter camping tips they help you if you need to bridge 1-2 days in a very cold apartment. Also having a winter camping sleeping bag can be nice.
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The 3rd point is just general good advice, at least skim the manual it might have surprisingly important things in it. And sometimes random but useful tips.
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> build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher
fun fact: this is how glaciers are formed, from non melting snow fall pilling up over years and by wight compressing the snow to ice
The most recent thing I've learned after a lifetime in the Midwest US: There's nothing like the 'Snow Wonder Snow Scoop'[1] for moving snow manually.
Someone left theirs at my wife's previous home and she's kept it since. I don't get sore after shoveling anymore. I have a snow blower but only use it when there's more than 6" on the ground.
I've tried other "push sled" style scoops and none of them work this well (and weigh so little).
[1]: https://snowscoop.com
The pictures show what looks like very powdery snow.
How does this fare with wet and icy snow?
We had a house growing up in Alaska with a steep pitch, and our Dad would get us in trouble for parking the car "too close" to the threshold of the house where the the accumulated snow on the roof could slide of and pound anything in its path.
One day sitting at the dinner table, we heard a giant slide and heard it smash onto the car, and fortunately we found the car keys in my Dad's jacket that night.
Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
> Even if your house technically runs on propane, and you have propane, electricity might still run the propane, so your house is going to get cold. Unless you run the woodstove. Which you will
Corollary: don’t buy a house in a place where it snows without two fully independent sources of heat. You want backups. There’s a reason why woodstoves are so popular in New England. A millivolt gas log stove on a thermostat can also be a good alternative.
8: that's why you have sharper slopes on the roof if you expect a lot of snow. Then it glide off.
We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.
It can also be structural. Depending on the elevation, my county mandates houses be designed to survive wind speeds up to 157 miles per hour and snow loads up to 545 pounds per square foot. That means a flat roof would have to be built like a parking garage floor, but a sloped roof can transfer that weight to the exterior walls, and an true A-frame directly transfers the load to the ground.
One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.
I suspect most places that experience regular heavy snow, deal well with it.
I have a friend that went to school in Buffalo, NY. That’s a city that experiences “lake effect” snow, during the winter.
He says all the sidewalks are basically “snow gorges,” but the roads clear quickly, and everyone knows how to dress for the cold.
He tells me a story about visiting northern Quebec, one summer, and seeing houses with a second front door, set on the second floor, and was told they were “snow doors,” for deep winter, so folks can get out, when the snow gets deep.
We tend to adapt well.
> Do NOT get wet and cold.
One thing i keep saying over and over, and few believe me, unless they know from experience - is that winters in Chicago are actually significantly more miserable than Minneapolis, where I went to college.
Minneapolis winters are so cold that everything is dry as a bone, so the cold doesn't 'stick' the same way - Chicago winters sit mostly in the 20-40 range where it's both wet and cold (often raining at a balmy 34-38F), and it's much much more immiserating to be outside.
If too many people read this, then what are FailArmy going to put in all their videos?
> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
A fun one I only learned recently in spite of having lived with snow all my life: while propane doesn't go liquid until around -80F, the oil pan in the generator needs help somewhere before -40F (and actually that was the wind chill, so it was probably only -20F or so). Thankfully we do have woodstoves, plural.
Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts. I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.
I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
The lesson I learned is to never live in a snowy place, but they're great for visiting!
Frozen plumbing pipe lessons ought to be here.
One thing this article doesn’t cover (but probably should): shoveling snow has a fairly high risk of heart attacks (especially past 50):
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/snow-shoveling-can-be-hazard...
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
Here in Finland there are a lot of people brought to hospital due to heart attacks whilst shoveling snow.
I didn't expect that, though I can't claim to be surprised by the number of elderly people who go to casualty due to falling on ice.
Cold weather itself increases the chance of heart attacks. Heat waves get all of the news coverage, but cold weather is the real killer: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...
I see a lot of people saying "We never lose power, what are you talking about?"
I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.
I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.
Let's have an article on:
"Lessons you will learn living in a place that doesn't regularly get a lot of snow."
I live in Northern Virginia, and ... DAMN, this has absolutely sucked for the past [almost] three weeks.
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.
For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
+1, I learnt too late how useful a brush is, also for clearing small puffy snowfalls much faster than shovelling
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
> 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.
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.
Beautiful, living in Southern Michigan and dealing with slightly more snow than usual this year, I feel like a wimp compared to some of my snowy-weather compatriots here from Norway, Canada, etc.
> If the power’s been off for a while, like, over 24 hours, and then suddenly it comes back on for a few minutes, and then it immediately goes out again
This is probably because the average idiot neglects to unplug motors (refrigerator, and other inductive loads), bringing down the network again, entirely unnecessarily.
The #1 lesson to learn from living in a snowy place, is to move away to a place that does not have that problem!
That's what I did and living on the California coast is much better.
I really do hate throwing shade on someone's article, but this reads like one of those "Pearls of Wisdom from Two Years of Junior-Level Software Development". Thanks, person who just a few months ago moved to a snowy, remote area with poor infrastructure, but this is NOT how you flush a toilet with no running water:
"Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl as fast as possible."
No, ya dork, you fill the tank then flush. There were a few other pearls, but no need to pile on. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or perhaps is put off the idea of moving to rustic, romanticized places when they'd be better off elsewhere.
It’s been a while since I had to operate a toilet without water service but what they described only works for the first flush since the tank would be full. After that, the tank is empty and after you fill the bowl, with the tank still empty, there will be barely any gravity assisted flow to “flush”. Makes me think they’ve actually never been in that situation.
Snow has this way of revealing which parts of your life are decorative and which parts are infrastructure
I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.
I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.
> If you’re short on kindling, sufficient cardboard CAN be used to light a big log on fire.
Fatwood (on Amazon) is amazing for this kind of stuff. It's much easier to start up a wood stove with a few sticks of it than "sufficient cardboard".
(Que the holier-than-thou folks who admonish anyone who has a wood stove.)
24. Live in CA.
Is it possible to use a flamethrower instead of a shovel to clear your driveway?
The math there gets pretty bad pretty fast. A cubic foot of snow represents ~15 lbs of ice. That corresponds to at 144 BTU to melt a lb of ice, that means you need at a minimum 2160 BTU of fuel (assuming 100% of your heat goes to melting the snow). A gallon of gasoline represents about 114,000 BTU, so each gallon of gas could clear, in a best case scenario where you can capture 100% of the heat, only 50 cubic feet of snow. That's a 10-foot by 10-foot area covered in 6 inches of snow.
But even that's in the dream scenario where somehow your snow is in a sealed, insulated space. In the real world, snow tends to be outside, in the cold air, which is very eager to sink and replace any hot air you make at ground level. So you're losing any heat that warms the air at all. And all that air in the snow makes it a fantastic insulator, meaning the vast majority of your heat isn't going to penetrate.
Interestingly, this same phenomena makes melting snow from underneath much more effective (as the great insulating snow captures the heat). You still need to grapple with the kinda nuts amount of energy it takes to melt ice, but at least you're not wasting 90% of it.
Yes, but it's nowhere near as effective as you might think. Also, due to its ineffectiveness, it ends up costing a LOT of fuel.
those handheld propane torches, oft used for weedburning on asphault/concrete, are very good for clearing "post snow clean up ice patches, IE tire treads that iced over, foot prints.
Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane
xkcd explored this question. too fuel-inefficient to be practical. much better to use that same fuel to run a giant snowblower (and move the snow rather than melt it).
https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/
No mention of wool unfortunately, if you've got to be wet and cold... nothing else beats it.
Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.
Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I think the bigger problem is that many of the tourists don't normally spend time outside, so they are used to only having enough gear for a heated building or car, even at home.
5. Snow will still get denser overtime, even if it never gets above freezing. the sunlight will melt it regardless.
I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
Also, sunlight improves your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYnUPxG7ONk
> starts to feel like cope
In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.
Regarding 5, the colder it is, the quicker the snow will settle and become hard to shovel by hand. Not like when it thaws and refreezes, but if it is -25 C you'll want to move most of it while it is falling or shortly after. It is likely the snow particles are very small and it will become very dense if allowed to sit for a while.
Regarding 6, you can't shovel snow fast. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Don't use a regular shovel, there are sled-like contraptions that allow you to push the snow around on the ground and that will allow you to bring it further with less effort. Dress appropriately, you don't want to become too sweaty and you are going to figure out an equilibrium where your heat and sweat production stabilises your temperature, or you're going to have to take breaks and on average get less done per unit time.
Regarding 9, if you don't have an axe, get one. In harsh conditions tools are what keep you alive and things like axes and knives are part of the basic equipment you need to have and take good care of. You do not split the wood indoors, do not bring it indoors unless it is split in small enough parts that lighting it will be easy.
Also, you should really avoid using wood that hasn't had good shelter up until time of use. Moist wood will add a lot of soot to your chimney and you are likely not able to clear it yourself, meaning that you run the risk of a chimney fire.
> Push comes to shove
No, no, no!
Push comes to shovel
I'll add this - for the love of God, please brush the snow off your car before you drive, especially after a storm.
If it gets above freezing during the day and freezes again at night, the snow will go through a melt/freeze cycle to become a nice thick sheet of ice. I don't know how many times I've seen a 3 inch sheet of ice go flying off a car traveling 70 mph on the Garden State Parkway. This is common sense and it's infuriating how brain dead people are about this. Incidents have killed people before.
Thankfully I've also seen NJ State Troopers hand out tickets for this. I now live in a state, Washington, where the politicians are too busy grandstanding on stupid issues while ice sheets go flying at cars around on the freeway after a snowstorm.