Ice Storm 2008

[helwen]

Friday, 4:00 AM, L wakes up and realizes the power is out (yes, within minutes of the town power being shut off - he's like that). He keeps the crank lantern by the bed, so off he goes to check things out, get the wood stove going, etc. I got up a bit later, realizing things were taking a while to get done. He got a fire going in the downstairs cook stove, too.

Somewhere in there I lit some of the oil lamps. I tried to start with the one in the hallway but forgot which way to turn the wick and dropped it out of the gripper. So I tried again with one in the bedroom and had success there, then used the lit one to see by in order to fix the hallway lamp. L was using the crank electric lantern but since we were now on the move around the house it seemed like a good idea to have some ambient light as well.

Oh, and I now have a memory rhyme for the oil lamps (on which you are supposed to turn the handle on clockwise to raise the wick):

Sun-wise, light rise.

At the time I was just happy I had more than one lamp to try lighting.... We have candles too of course, but I like glass enclosures when I may be leaving the room the flame is in.

NOTE: L really likes the crank lantern and it certainly performed very well this weekend. We will be investing in a second one. They're around $30, so it was a good idea to test it first.

***
The house furnace is wood-fired with oil backup. Circulation of the heated water to the radiators uses electricity. L found water in the basement from one of the valves -- doing its job of trying to release pressure, but the system needed help. He opened the check valve, which was good because the furnace had been stocked so it was still heating the water -- which had no way to go anywhere. Opening the valve, the heat was all going straight up the chimney and coming out of the radiator that's behind our wood stove in our kitchen. Which meant it was so warm upstairs that we had to open two of the kitchen windows and the door into the back attic. It took nearly a day for the furnace to cool enough before more wood could be added.

The heating system can work without electricity, by convection. As L puts it "heat rises". But it means feeding the furnace smaller amounts of wood at more frequent intervals. After the past few days, he's thinking the backup system's primary purpose is to keep the pipes from freezing, not to warm the house. Anyway, with the system so hot and electricity out, he did things like cut the 2nd floor out of the heating loop (because the system was bypassing the first floor, trying to get heat up here), and some of the water had to be drained.

Anyway, Friday the whole house was reasonably comfortable, Saturday evening the first floor was getting a bit chillier. Sunday L brought our stove top fan downstairs to put on the folk's cook stove because it was still warmer upstairs than downstairs, and we just closed off more rooms, plus the pantry and the end of the hallway past the office.

***
Resources

Water:

Water wasn't a problem because we have the spring coming into the house as well as the regular water. The spring is accessible by a faucet in the back kitchen (1st floor, below the back attic), and by a spout at the top of the stairs in the back attic, just outside our kitchen. The downstairs bathroom can also be switched from town water to the spring, which made life more comfortable all around. Although we did continue to use the upstairs bathroom as well. We also had bottled water (1/2 gallon jugs) -- I'd originally started storing some extra water in Holyoke and kept the practice when we moved. Even though we had the spring water the jugs were handy because we could station them where we needed them and not have to wait for the spring water. The reason the house doesn't rely on just the spring is because it has limitations -- if someone flushes, no water to the faucet or the pipe above until the tank refills.

No hot water of course, so it was nice to be able to go down the hill on Saturday and take a shower :) But we did heat water for cooking and washing dishes. I even filled the big thermos with some of the extra hot water today, which we'll use for tea this evening. If we hadn't had the option of going down the hill, we could have heated water for necessary washing.

Cooking:

Some warming up of things was possible on the wood stove but we're still kind of working that out. Happily the back kitchen has a gas stove with pilot light, so it was only dependent on having enough fuel (which it does), not on electricity.

Food:

Friday morning we were busy figuring out what needed doing, so we got out some emergency ration bars. They're not terrible and also L heated up water and made hot chocolate. I called gwynt_y_storm, figuring she might have a better idea of stuff going on here than we did, not having power. That's when we got the offer of a shower -- something we couldn't do that day because of the roads all being closed.

We had hot meals for lunch and dinner Friday, and L made oatmeal and tea as usual Saturday morning.

Saturday we went down to Sunderland so we ate out for a meal, then back home and noshed a bit on things in the evening. Sunday another usual breakfast, plus veggie juice, and lunch with the folks downstairs -- Ma wanted to warm things up a bit with the oven, so she was going to bake a pie, and I had some chicken that had thawed so we broiled that. We also had some quick bread from the freezer, and cooked up some fresh spinach and sweet potatoes too.

If we hadn't had the gas stove we still could have heated water on the wood stove (either one, actually) and made pasta, soup, or some other things. Barring those, we have some canned fruit (just got some on sale a few weeks ago!) and some dried fruits and nuts. I like snacking on the dried fruits and nuts, plus they're easy to pack for trips.

Food Storage:

The fridge held up quite well through Friday and most of Saturday. It's only ~3 feet away from the wood stove, so I grabbed a piece of puffy foil insulation sheeting we still had and wrapped it around the front of the fridge. Saturday evening we moved frozen goods into a couple of coolers and moved them down to the front porch (north-facing). L had already brought the (not-so) frozen dough downstairs before that. I think it was this morning that we emptied a bunch of stuff out of the fridge-side and put it in the back attic.

Heating:

It was never really cold here in the apartment, although I think it got into the mid-to-upper 50s F this morning. In fact I had more problems with it being too warm sometimes, as we accommodated to what was happening with the furnace.

We discussed the bedding today and decided the comforter has to come off because it traps body heat _too_ well, which leads to being sweaty and uncomfortable. The wool is coming out!

The back attic got up to 52F (usually in the 40s this time of year), probably because first we had to vent some of the excess heat from the furnace into it, and then we were traveling between the first and second floors quite a bit, using the back stairs as well as the front ones. L had to open the attic window during the day-time today to keep it cool enough for the food we'd put out there.

***
Things we did:

A lot of cleaning and putting things away. L was all over the place of course, because maintaining wood stoves and the finicky furnace is a lot of work. Plus he was helping with the chickens and things -- no doubt he'll write more about all of that. Oh, one thing he did was discover some water getting into the basement and putting a piece of sheet metal against the house that diverted the water away from the house.

I worked on a quilted wall-hanging I've been meaning to make and am well along.

Had nice chats on the phone with gwynt_y_storm and ellid. Chatted with in-laws too.

L read aloud to me some of the time I was sewing. He also worked on tuning his harp.

Played a little backgammon.

Went shopping with gwynt_y_storm et al - went to Annie's Garden Center and got a most lovely bracelet -- the artist does bronze castings of plants -- mine is Olympic Myrtle. Then we went to The Mercantile in Amherst, which was entertaining, and then we were going to go to The Creative Needle, further down the row of shops, when we all spotted the display in an antique shop's window. All sorts of nifty things and we had a lovely time there. The lady was very nice and informative and really appreciated our appreciation of the things there. They had lots of different sorts of things, a nice old-fashioned shop. We finally left there, though not with our wallets as full as before, and over to The Creative Needle, where L found some buttons he liked and S got her embroidery thread. Then back to their place for pizza (Yum, Frontier Pizza is most excellent).

***
While it's nice having running water upstairs again, and I'm glad we didn't have to deal with major flooding or downed trees (at least near the house), it really wasn't so bad as all that -- hard work yes, and we were surely tired at the end of each day, but not so bad at all.

Overall our emergency plans operated pretty well, and we were able to adapt to changes well. L has a better idea of what the furnace does and what needs to be attended to and when. Oh, and William is now quite receptive to the idea of a backup power generator for the furnace.

There are still a lot of home without power in other towns. Even in a more lightly-hit area like ours, when we drove up Baptist Corner Road on Saturday, not a house did we pass but had branches or whole trees down by them, and other places as well. May everyone find the help and support they need during this time!

Comments

[freya46.livejournal.com]

(((((HUGS)))

[helwen.livejournal.com]

*hugs back*

Thanks :) Hugs are definitely a part of keeping going in tough times!

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

Good to see you're doing well.

Regarding running the wood-fired boiler without electricity, why is it that you needed smaller, more frequent fires? If the rooms the radiators were in were still cold, it leads me to believe that either a) the water wasn't getting hot enough (suggesting that you could have benefitted from a hotter fire), or b) the radiators were doing a poor job transferring heat from the water to the air (perhaps they normally rely on fans?). I'd be interested to know more about this.

[helwen.livejournal.com]

The boiler doesn't handle the ability to move water as well without electricity, so I guess the answer is (b).

We had to make sure the heat moved on before adding more heat to the water in the boiler. Basically the so-called backup system is only good enough to keep the pipes from freezing. Now, mind you the system had to be drained first because the boiler was way too hot, because neither L (who only moved here last year) and W, who doesn't really understand his furnace, didn't know that the system was having problems at first. Previous-living-here-son-Warren knew more about how the furnace works. He dropped by sometime Saturday, and in a quick conference they discussed how the water from the spring could be used to put water back into the system and how the convection system worked.

Next time (if we don't get a generator in time and/or if it fails for some reason), L will know to switch things over sooner, and perhaps with a smoother transition it will perform a little better. But the manual says that no matter what, smaller amounts of wood, more frequently. So I'd say it wasn't really designed for working without electricity for the circulation system.

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

It's more like c) the circulating pumps would normally move the hot water both towards the radiators and away from the boiler, to prevent the water from overheating. Without the pumps, convection will do that, but at a much slower rate. The water in the boiler will become much hotter before it can rise up the loop to the radiators. We did find that making the water hotter than recommended did get it to rise through the loop faster, but the manual for the boiler was very explicit that that was not a good idea, certainly not for an extended period of time. There's a section specifically on how to judge how much wood to put into the firebox at each firing to maintain the water at the optimum temperature for convection.

[oakmouse]

These posts are fascinating. When you've got them all up, or at least when L has his day-by-day series finished, would you post links to them on the AODA list please? I think this is valuable information.

[helwen.livejournal.com]

*blush*

Sure!

[oakmouse]

Thank you!

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

I wasn't used to the routine that is involved in keeping things going without power, and the writing of the series kind of illustrates that over the days. The first day is much more detailed and clear than the last day.

I'm also going to need to post an "aftermath" post, to collect thoughts and observations that didn't make it the chronicle, such as the sounds of being outdoors, listening to the echoes of trees breaking...

[oakmouse]

I figured more was in the pipeline, which is why I couched my request as I did. I think the lack of fine detail in the later posts isn't any kind of detriment; rather it reflects the experience of living through the process and adjusting. It's all worth reading and thinking about.

The sound of frozen trees snapping is just heartbreaking. :-p