Winter weather??

Dad just let me know he’s lost power in Ft Mill. He’s barely into SC by 200 yards or so.
 
I lost power too on Matthews/Indian Trail/Charlotte border.
House is 66*. Gas logs on and a few candles lit. Wife wants generator to start, but I'm not relishing dinking around with the propane tanks yet since I doubt they'll work at 12*.
 
9 in north Durham, they claim wind chill -4 but I've yet to see any breeze (thank goodness, hopefully the lack of one will help the people get their power back faster). The "real feel" -1, but I'm not going outside to test it.

My sister in law in south Durham lost power (my mother-in-law lives with her), so she may be turfing my MIL to us 😒.
 
Snal~ said:
exterior mounted on-demand gas water heater
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We have the same but no freeze kit.
Temperature went down to 10 and I wasn’t going out at 2 am to manually drain the system so ran a faucet to keep hot water flowing, not very efficient but it worked.
on a good note, I checked the specs this morning on the Rinnai and it’s good down to negative 4
 
heavydoc said:
Apparently my water has frozen. Still got a little flow l, but hardly any! My water pipe from my well is supposed to be 4 foot deep. I guess I'll be finding out soon
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And my water has now stopped! This should be fun to deal with
 
fieldgrade said:
We had some high twenty degree weather one weekend the first December. Got down to 27 and the house stayed comfortable at 72. That heat pump did make some odd noises though, which was my first clue. I manually set it to “em heat” after that, got it fixed the next week and I only run gas in the winter now due to some early compressor failures I’ve observed with the neighbor’s same age Trane units.

They tried to tell me it’s more efficient to run the heat pump down to 40. I figure not if that additional mileage causes an early failure that will be on my dime.
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We just installed an entirely new HVAC system earlier this month. Went dual fuel, heat pump plus propane. Ours is set to kick over to gas at 35. It didn’t function like that at first and stayed on heat pump, except in defrost cycle. The installer called tech support and told him to disable the “load clamp” that was keeping it on heat pump as long as it could get any efficiency gain.

Need a bigger propane tank as the one that came with the house is too small. I did some back of the napkin calculations and have enough to get through this stupid cold spell, but will be calling for a refill next week. undoubtedly they’ll be closed on Monday.
 
I let the truck warm up. Driver door still frozen shut. Finally got it open but the latch mechanism inside the bowels of the door is frozen. Won’t latch shut. Like Ford vs Ferrari.

Finally got it to latch, then got in through the passenger side.
 
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Torn and Frayed said:
ok so done with winter on day 3
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I suggested spending the weekend in West Jeff and was voted down 3-1. I live with cowards.
 
chiefjason said:
They have frozen. But it had less water in it. So it had room to expand. It was pretty close to full this time. I don't use the water this time of year so it's a no brainer for me. I drained it just to be sure.
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Well, we bottomed out at 9° this morn, and when I checked my (full) tote there was about a quarter inch of ice under the cap, which seemed to extend out along the inside of the liner.

I had loosened the cap to make sure air could get out as the ice formed, but that was it. Didn't drain anything.

I didn't mess with the lower valve at all.
 
Chuckman said:
9 in north Durham, they claim wind chill -4 but I've yet to see any breeze (thank goodness, hopefully the lack of one will help the people get their power back faster). The "real feel" -1, but I'm not going outside to test it.

My sister in law in south Durham lost power (my mother-in-law lives with her), so she may be turfing my MIL to us 😒.
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It was indeed crisp out there... and may the force be with you.
 
Woke up with our power out this morning. We are on a well and I didn't think to fill up the bathtubs so we would have water to flush the toilets.

Got the buddy heater out and fired up in the living room. Had to manually open the garage door to get my wife's car out so we could get to the non-ethanol gas and kerosene heater. Got the generator over to the well, where I had put a plug and receptacle on it, got the generator going and plugged the well into the generator. Filled up buckets and jugs so good to go. Got the kerosene heater in the living room and was working on getting it going when the power came back on. I'm figuring it was out for about 2 hours or so.
 
mj1angier said:
They are doing rolling black-out now to keep up with demand. So if you lose power it might be back on by the time you get the genny running, lol
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Yeah I woke up around 7am because it got cold and the dog was fussing and power was out. Fortunately it's back on now.

Wish I could say the same about my water.
 
mj1angier said:
They are doing rolling black-out now to keep up with demand. So if you lose power it might be back on by the time you get the genny running, lol
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Wow, and on a weekend day... That is really unexpected. When I checked outages this morning NC was in great shape. I wonder what has gone wrong, given the winds are much lower.
 
My paranoia continued ahead of the front yesterday. Went a little Redneck and helped out my 60 year old crawlspace vents with extra wind protection.

Nothing’s insulated under there, and the water’s still flowing today so I’d like to think it helped.

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Pogue said:
My paranoia continued ahead of the front yesterday. Went a little Redneck and helped out my 60 year old crawlspace vents with extra wind protection.

Nothing’s insulated under there, and the water’s still flowing today so I’d like to think it helped.

View attachment 563208
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Pretty sure mine froze at the well head. Or my pump picked a hell of a time to quit
 
heavydoc said:
Pretty sure mine froze at the well head. Or my pump picked a hell of a time to quit
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Only time my well froze was about 30 yrs ago when we got down to 0 and the bulb I had under the well cover had burned out and I didn't know it. It was the pipe from the top of the well to the house that froze and a few minutes with a hair dryer had it running it again. I put one of the domed chick lights under the cover yesterday with a 100 w bulb and then the power was out this morning, but nothing froze.

Problem now is trying to find decent 60 or 100 watt incandescent light bulbs. LED bulbs are useless.
 
beamernc said:
Only time my well froze was about 30 yrs ago when we got down to 0 and the bulb I had under the well cover had burned out and I didn't know it. It was the pipe from the top of the well to the house that froze and a few minutes with a hair dryer had it running it again. I put one of the domed chick lights under the cover yesterday with a 100 w bulb and then the power was out this morning, but nothing froze.

Problem now is trying to find decent 60 or 100 watt incandescent light bulbs. LED bulbs are useless.
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I went to lowes and Home Depot in search of bathroom heat lamps. All sold out. Guess I wasn’t the only one with that idea yesterday.
 
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