It’s going to turn cold next week in the western USA. Then spill east. On Wednesday 25F below normal in Denver and 25F above normal in Chicago, if I read it right.
This is a time of the yr when there have been tree damaging freezes. There were peach trees in CA nurseries killed in early Dec a few yrs ago. WA state has also had severe damage this time of yr. I hope everyone’s trees are dormant. The warm fall has me concerned, not here, but maybe elsewhere.
Yea, we’re supposed to have lows below 30F for a few nights late next week where I am in the southeast. I’m not sure if everything is completely dormant just yet. Luckily, I have quite a few things in containers (including some young stone fruit rootstocks) so I think I may move them to the unheated garage for a few days just to be safe.
global warming getting worse and worse each year
Was just outside, it’s right around 40 and windy, not real pleasant. I’m glad I went to the orchard yesterday, it was about 60.
My newly planted fruit trees have just about lost all their leaves. I just hope we don’t have a winter like we did in early 2015, with temps below zero for a few days. Don’t know if my trees could handle that.
I’m more worried about my pecan bare root trees making it thru the cold. I’ve already lost two of them over the summer, don’t know why that happened, but from what I’ve read on here, bare root pecans don’t have very good transplant success rates.
Not looking forward to winter, it seems like for 4 months out of the year I can’t seem to stay warm. I’m not the most robust of fellows, so I don’t have a lot of “insulation”. So, from about Dec to April, I’m almost always wearing thermal undergarments. We keep the thermostat set at about 65, just can’t be paying a $300/mo electric bill by keeping the heat turned up.
Same for me- my weight rarely tops 150, at just over 6’ tall, so I’m cold all winter- though I’m thinking of just turning the thermostat up this year 
I started in October this year. I’m not sure how I got by without them, before my wife got me some a few years ago and told me to wear them, figuring it would save money over giving me free reign on the thermostat.
Yep, looking chilly here in NorCal next Tues/Wed as well. Highs in the mid 50’s lows around 35. December is traditionally our coldest month.
I’ve wore them most of life in the winter, but didn’t need them much down in Texas. For the last 3 years here in KY, they’ve been on just about every day during the winter. I am not tolerant to cold, but my wife is opposite, I’ve seen her out in weather like this in short sleeves. Not me, I break out the “long johns” if the temp is in the 40s or below. It was hunting season here the last couple of weeks, with the temps in the 30-50 range, and I had them on then.
Yep, same for me, I understand your plight. Guess you could call us “adiposely challenged”.
Well, I’d like to do that, but for the aforementioned reason, we just can’t afford it. We live in a decent sized single wide, with central air/heat, but it is still expensive to heat the house. I even put up film on our window frames to keep the drafts down. Even tho this house has the max amount of insulation, it still gets a bit drafty.
What do you usually set the thermostat at, and what does a typical electric bill run for y’all in the winter?
Mine appear to be getting there. Losing leaves, still have some. The figs are all dormant and in the garage already. Good luck everybody.
40’s & 50’s this weekend which will be nice since I have 15 more pounds of garlic to plant. When I’m done I would love to get my two dozen apple trees in the ground!
Time is short for planting before the ground is solid or its just too cold to work. highs in the 20s and 30s by mid week.
$300/month is a lot to heat a relatively small house. We used to use an oil-fired hydroair system (boiler heats water, pump it around the house and use air handlers to send it through ducts). When we did that, it was ~800 gal of oil per winter. At $2.50/gal, that works out to $2000 per winter, or $350-400 per month, to heat a 3500 sq ft house.
Almost two years ago, we got a solar array, then, the following winter got heat pumps, which tie into the air handlers feeding the ductwork. So, it’s a bit hard to measure how much we pay for the heating. In the last year, our electric bill has been $460, half of which is the connection fees. So the solar array covered all but $230 of usage. The heat pumps only work down to about 0F, so we keep the oil boiler as a backup, but didn’t use much last year. This winter will be the first real test, as we’ll have had the heat pumps for the entire year.
In terms of temps, I have the main area on 70F and the other areas (bedrooms and addition) at 68F. The vent in my home office is a bit strong, so between that, a small room, and the computers running, I can often keep it 78-80F (about right for me, though I keep the sweater, shirt, and full body thermal underwear on). Back when we were on oil, we kept the thermostats around 68F and 62F, trying to save money.
In the midwest, most of us heat with nat gas, which has been profoundly cheap the last several years
A lot of windfarming outfits have failed because they can’t compete with the cost of generating electric w/nat gas
Newest models runs show below zero next week after a weekend snowstorm…maybe 6 inches…hard to tell…too far out to really nail it down. The cold looks like the real deal…been showing it for some time. If we get a decent snow cover…-10F or colder is a good possibility next week///along with single digit high temps–probably quite a bit of cold for a week to 10 days. Looks like a nice warm u p right before xmas… we’ll see.
I’ve never been in minus 10.Is there a temperature at some point,where it is not safe even to be outside?Seems like it might even be tough to breathe if a wind was blowing. Brady
It depends on your insulation, you have to be dressed for it
And your question is the reason they invented the wind chill factor
-10F with a 20 mph wind gives a wind chill of -32 F. It is pretty hard to deal with that combo. You can get frostbite in less than 10 min in that sort of condition.
No wind and -10F isn’t so bad. It is cold, but you can stay warm with clothing. With the wind blowing it is hard to stay warm in the face and hands with any sort of clothing on.
We just got down to 25 degrees last night. Thursday is supposed to be a “wintery mix” with winds between 31 and 39 mph and a quarter inch of ice! My daughter has never driven in that stuff before, and is supposed to work swing shift…
Pretty brisk here with a 4ish above 0 F chill factor, but we dressed for it and got in a 2 1/2 mile walk.
Everything’s dormant except the squirrels, crows, and flickers, it seems. My biggest worry at the moment is whether my garlic has enough cover - just about no snow over it, more’s the pity.
Quite a few years ago the chill factor here hit -80 F and the garbage trucks still ran! Car engines would barely run (assuming you could even get them started) and people were hanging blankets over doors and windows. We went out in it just long enough to say we’d done it.
One year camping it was about 0 F and we slept in an unheated tent. Had to thaw our eggs so we could cook them for breakfast. I wouldn’t do that again, but 20+ years ago it was an “adventure”.
Brady,
Wear a ski mask, warm clothes etc… I went out to hunt food for us many years at 6 am and came back at 6 pm and it was -20 F a good portion of the day. I used several tricks which were double ski masks and army coat, double socks, trioxane fuel tablets ( makes a fire that burns a while in a snow drift when no dry fuel is available ) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00GJ08WIC/ref=pd_aw_sim_468_2/156-1295588-9809924?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XQZ96TP4KXWPFEGXQJTE
ravioli , beans, coffee in a thermas etc to keep your insides warm ( cook whatever over the fire) . I also grew up around several military guys so I spent much of my days behind cedars to keep warm and to camouflage smell and me. Use the terrain so walk behind hills when you can so the windshield does not affect you. I have not hunted in years but that’s how to stay alive outside. Part of the secret is being young and in great shape which I was at the time. As you get older use other tricks like keeping a cellphone handy and a truck close by in the field. Use your truck for a windbreak and put it on the other side of where your working. Hot coffee etc still applies but you can enjoy it inside the heated truck. Make sure you keep your fuel tank full.
-10 is balmy if it’s sunny and no wind.
I spent a few days ice fishing on Lake Of the Woods a number of years ago. -30 was as warm as it got. We caught plenty of fish