How is your weather? (Part 1)

Sounds like you must be quite a character…:flushed::flushed:

my wife would totally agree with you.

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Nope, I had the last laugh! I made sure it didn’t build any character at all! :crazy_face:

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I’d be divorced living in a car in a parking lot if i set it at 60F :wink: I turn it back to 67F or 68F at night. 70F during the day.
I think kids are immune to the cold…my daughter will go out and get the mail with no shoes/socks on///the other day the temp was around 0F and there is snow and ice on the ground…i yelled at her but she just went anyways…

Heat pumps have come a long way. Minisplit heat pumps are all the rage in high performance, super insulated homes being built. Heat in winter, ac in summer…many operate below 0F (some down to -20F). I’ve actually thought about putting one in just to tinker with it in the winter and mainly use it for AC in the summer (basement).

The insulation on most under insulated homes can be substantially improved. It helps with the cooling bill as much as heating in a climate like FL. It’s usually easy to blow insulation into the attic. The walls are more difficult but not out of the question.

You can drive down the streets up here right now and see which houses are properly insulated. Any house with huge icicles running the length of the house roof is almost a dead giveaway to substantial heat loss to the attic (causing the snow to melt). I blew in a lot of cellulose years ago into my attic and rarely do i see any melt until the temp warms or the sunshine starts to hit the southern side enough to melt… insulation is only part of it…you can lose substantial amounts of heat to cracks/holes/etc…doors that don’t properly shut…windows that aren’t sealed properly. Although some air exchange is healthy…although newer very tight homes will put in heat exchangers to efficiently move fresh air in and stale air out.

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We had more snow than predicted. most winters we get no snow but last night allowed my area to add another snow day for a grand total of TWO snow days in ONE winter!
We got down to 17 degrees last night with single digit wind chills. Today we will not get above freezing (high of 31). That is crazy cold for south Alabama! Hope the trees I planted last weekend will be ok. I raked the snow away from the base of the trees in hopes of warming them up a bit.

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Rake the snow back! It’s insulation

Ok. Lol. Rookie mistake.

Our lunchtime view from the Lago restaurant in Las Vegas.

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You might also want to consider some white paint on the trunks or the white spiral tree covers. To reflect sun on those cold days. Perhaps not a necessity where you are, but if you get a very sunny day it can heat the trunk to the point where it starts pulling water up, and then a quick drop down to low temps (<20F) can kill those trunk cells.

I’m impressed by your tracks, no wasted steps there, just exactly enough steps around each tree to pull the snow back. Looks a little like a zen garden

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i was raised in a cheaply made old trailer here in n. Maine. we had a oil heater but it was only back up for the wood stove. we were poor so my father would keep the thermostat at 60f in -20f weather! we had so many quilts piled on you could hardly breathe! 1st. one to get up ran to get the wood stove stoked back up! we put plastic on the inside and outside as the windows were only single pane. don’t know how we survived in there as long as we did!

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That sounds like a cold way to live in Maine, lol. We burned wood when I was growing up, I still do here at my house, and when I was about 14 I was the first one to get home and I was supposed to build up the fire. We had a big wood stove and a really big stone fire place with steel doors and blowers above the fire box. I got home one cold day and went squirrel hunting instead of putting wood on the fires . When I got home after dark everyone was home and dad explained that if I was going to go squirrel hunting that I better put wood on the fires first. So the next night I split a bunch of red oak real fine ( being a smart ass ) and completely filled the fire box on the fireplace and shut the doors and turned the blower on. When I got home the doors on the house were propped open and dad said when he got home the blower vents were glowing red. Got a pretty strong talking to on that one.

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luckily my father was a jack of all trades and could jerry rig anything. he built our old chicken coop and shed 40+ yrs ago with a chainsaw and they’re still standing!

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i once got up to make the fire but couldn’t find the matches so i lit a piece of paper towel from the propane stove and tried to get it to the wood stove. wound up burning a hole in the shag carpet and setting off the fire alarm, waking everyone on a sat. morning! got spoken to by everyone!! we used to go thru 8 cords of hardwood per winter. even when my parents had their new house built in the late 80’s they still used 7 cord.

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I only barely remember the first house I lived in, with the coal-fired furnace

And a few years later, houses that no longer burned coal still had the coal cellar and the window for the chute

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That is a pile of wood , we measure wood here by the rick or face cord which is not a true way to measure but that is how it is here. On a cold winter I burn about eight to ten rick of 18" oak. Here is a funny story, a friend of mine was helping a guy cut some wood. Ray told him that it had to be real short to fit into the stov, so the were cutting it in little pieces less than a foot long. My friend said it was crazy to have to cut it that short and that he had never seen a heater that took such short wood. When they hauled it to Rays house , Ray took some in to put in the stove. It was a warm morning stove that you load from the end ( don’t know if you ever saw one) and he said see the door is less than a foot wide. My friend said yeah but the fire box is 18 inches deep , you supposed to put the wood in long ways. Ray couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that, lol

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This is our 2nd snow. The first was a blizzard (intersection of low pressure circulation moving up the coast with high winds and a arctic clipper. That dropped 8") Here we got about 4".
Beautiful, kinda erie, so quiet, almost anechoic. Just standing and taking it all in is awesome. Love the winter. This is just before sunrise.
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We’ve had a much coolder winter than usual. Happy to be inside cooking.

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Naefs continues to show the warmth around the lakes/northeast late month.

This weekend still looks all rain around these parts…areas from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis look snowy…maybe a foot or more in some areas…wet heavy stuff too. Very mild temps on the way. Talking 45F here Fri/Sat… shorts weather.

Was listening to talk radio and they were saying most of the state of Wisconsin the snowmobile trails have still not opened, except in the far northern counties.

The cold front that was in the Gulf of Mexico has cleared the Yucatan and all of Florida over night …Temp in Miami was 44F this morning…Key West is showing 60F for a high today…brrrrr

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