Many in Oregon still without power...over a week.

I know my house isn't up for a hard freeze, so I just loaded up some water (in coolers, etc..), shut off the main, and drained the pipes. Cracked it when the temps got up above freezing, shower, wash dishes, replenish any used water, then close the main again. Fortunately, I didn't lose power for long. Would have been OK though. Plenty of camping gear.

Now a lot of the gas stations are out of fuel. Good thing I have 7 company work trucks and 4 clunkers of my own. Most fueled up beforehand.

One thing this event should teach, is not to be totally reliant on one type of energy source. Relying solely on electric is a bad idea.

Mistake: Should have gotten that honey bee nest out of the chimney... D'oh. If my power had gone out for an extended period of time, that would have been a nice option.

Might need to start a new thread for that...

One last hurdle tonight, then we warm up. Then the political blame game will heat up. Wish we could hook up a few turbines to that.

Probably won't be using the phrase 'chill out' for a while.

Dave

It starts with design. Make sure that no pipes are in cold areas that can freeze. Don't bring in the water line to a house into an unheated garage, then have the main pipe cross the ceiling.

In the cold climates, you have basements. And water lines must enter below the frostline. We do not normally have a "frost line". So no basements, just a slab.

Heat tracing lines is fine, but that assumes you have electricity. And even backup generators can fail, or the gas supply can go out!

Designers here focus on the heat of summer. Make sure south facing windows have something to shade them, etc. Look at how big the Air Conditioners are. My house has 2. It is common in newer homes to have a third, small unit for the master suite. It is about climate control.

Not much thought is given to heat.

I have 2 clients that have solar systems with battery backup and generator. And electric heat. My office was electric heat. The coils for electric heat for my 650 sq ft office were 12kW. They needed to be 5kW.

One client called that she was having trouble with he 48 kW generator. I'm trying to figure out how things could have gone so wrong that she overloaded the generator. When we designed the system, she had heat pumps. When she installed, there was an issue and she switched to electric resistant heating. I told her to switch off two heating zones and see how it worked.

The other client has battery backup & solar, but no generator. He has 28.8 kWh of electric storage. Power went out. Then the backup failed. Electric heat!

This is a failure of imagination. A failure to think that this could occur. Like allowing construction of a housing development in an area that will flood if a dam goes full. Idiots.

Hundreds of MegaWatts can be generated from all that hot air. Might have averted the crisis if we had thought to hook it up sooner.

That's hilarious, pNutz! I wonder if Toby/Captain Caveman has seen that one! :D


Very sound advice. The good thing is I can do all the work involved in making improvements, but I just need to summon the will to do so. I guess I could start slow and chip away at shoring up the plumbing first (already working on one set of pipes that are in a freeze-likely spot, since one of them froze solid this week), just so long as it doesn't interfere with my ever evolving, a/c projects (priorities!). :)

Just a heads up. When it gets cold like this, insulated lines alone won't stop the lines from freezing. You need to have heat tape on them too (doesn't do much good without power though!) I've had waterlines that I insulated with a tape seal insulation in my crawlspace freeze and burst in the winter. Insulation alone won't stop them from freezing. I completely sealed the crawlspace so that it would not get cold enough to freeze. Now all my lines are exposed... and no frozen lines. I still tend to drip faucets when it gets really cold out just as a preventative.

Best money I've spent it on getting the entire envelope sealed. I've spent a lot of time and a good bit of money insulating my home over the last several years. Last year I had an energy audit done to find the areas that need addressed. My over 100 year old home is now sealed to about the minimum standard (Oh Joy) of a modern home. The auditor said without going nuts it's about as good as I can get it.

2 words: Spray foam

This all also begs the question, how much is economically practical? Do we have to design to the standards associated with a 100 or 1000 year event? The worst possible scenario that could ever occur? Because I strongly suspect that LA isn’t designed for the worst possible earthquake, MSP isn’t designed for the worst possible cold and snow, and FL isn’t designed for the worst possible hurricane. In KS we have extensive codes related to wind and tornado resistance, but nothing short of building your house underground will save it from an EF5 tornado.

And, as pwd stated, Oregon isn't set up to handle an ice storm.

Some bright spots:

Texas never lost the electric grid. If we lost the grid, all the units connected to the grid would trip. If you think getting a couple dozen units restarted is difficult like what happened on Monday, try getting a few hundred units restarted in freezing weather. We'd have been down for a week or more.

We never lost gas to homes that I know of. I feel for those that don't have gas heating but it was a godsend for us any everyone else who did.

I read yesterday that they were on the verge of losing the entire crop.

Oklahoma got lucky. We were even colder than Texas, and had more snow. Right now the power issue is averted. The big problem for the city is the water. With so many people running water at ever faucet they city water plants can't process the water fast enough to keep up.

Our house was built with some intelligence and foresight. ALL of the plumbing is in the slab, all Pex, and all are on inside walls. We have not had to drip any faucets. We were very fortunate and never lost power.

My neighbor right behind our house spent a lot of money putting in a whole house generator. In the many years he has had it, it has run for 20 minutes total. I figure his investment is helping keep the power on around here. I know if I spent 10 grand on a generator we would never have another power outage.

They certainly were but they didn't. As painful as the blackouts (really brownouts) were, they saved us from losing the grid (a true blackout).


I was talking to a friend living north of Houston outside of Centerpoint's area where they have a small COOP electric company. He said they had true rolling brownouts, where it was an hour off, an hour on, etc. Apparently Centerpoint, the T&D (transmission and distribution) company in Houston were not able to do proper rolling brownouts.

It seems to me that a non-electric, portable heat source would be ideal for most people that had this problem. I have a dual element "Mr Heater" that is mounted on top of a 20# propane tank that has 4 settings of intensity....this would most certainly keep water lines from freezing. I use this heater in my shop all Winter, and I have 3 spare full propane tanks.

As far as food spoiling, place it in a sealed cooler out in your cold garage to lengthen it's life.

Update: 27 degrees this morning. By Houston standards, that would be really cold, but somehow feels relatively warm given the drama of this week. It's a crisp, blue-sky morning -- low humidity. Sun is bright, so we should warm up quick. Supposed to see 60s this weekend.

We've had power restored for 32 hours now, and the local utility is reporting pretty much all customers were restored by last evening (ahead of the sub-freezing temps overnight). Water pressure built throughout the day yesterday. I was able to take a drizzle shower last night, which was appreciated. Pressure appears to be close to normal levels this morning.

So far, I appear fortunate to have not had any burst pipes. Am VERY thankful about that. Something weird was happening with some of my sprinkler system plumbing, but whatever, that's not important and was able to be shutoff. Will figure it out later.

I helped my neighbor repair a burst pipe yesterday. His house was a renovation of a 100 year old house. Appears the builder didn't bother to insulate the copper lines under his fully vented crawl space. We'll have to get those pipes wrapped when temps are better and foam insulation is back in stock. Nothing to do now but cap busted lines.

I haven't drained the tubs yet -- will give it one more day to make sure the water is back for good. But otherwise feels like we made it through.

Lessons learned:

- I'm very thankful I bought a "hurricane" generator 12 years ago (post-Ike) and converted it to run natural gas. It ran like a champ and I never had to get gasoline. But I also need to do some updates on the system: The generator (which had never been run except for initial testing) had to be "rigged" at the last minute -- it only had 1 phase with regular 120V outlets. The other phase had a circular "locking" receptacle which I rewired with an external outlet. I should have paid more attention to that. The generator didn't power much, but having a working TV, fridge, space heater, and charging station helped a bunch.

- I also should have "gotten around to" finishing the backfeed on my house. The wires are already run to the breaker, but I never bought the backfeed box to connect it to the generator. Had I done that, I would have had the ability to run my furnace (which is gas fired). I'd always planned on a hurricane and didn't expect my small generator (4kw) to run my AC units, so I didn't bother -- but in this case it would have powered the blower on my heater just fine. I could have rigged it, but my furnace is in the 3rd floor attic -- too far/dangerous to comfortably string extension cords (150 feet).

- I should have filled my tubs to the top at the first sign of extended power outages. Houston does not use water towers (the soil is crap and towers are expensive) -- we use pump stations. Those stations typically have some backup, but the backups were exhausted. I did half-fill my tubs, but flushing toilets uses a surprising amount of water. My neighbor has a pool and I took 20 gallons from him mid-week. We did set aside 5 gallons of drinking water, but again, that goes quicker than you think -- we were conserving and still using a couple gallons a day for a family of 4.

- I will re-wrap all my exposed pipes. I did this a bunch of years ago. The insulation that's not exposed to the elements looks great -- the stuff that saw sun is basically all gone. Shame on me for not having maintained that. I tried to get insulation last weekend -- there was none to be found. I used old T-shirts and moving blankets instead. It seems to have worked. I'm thinking of using pool noodles on a couple key pipes -- thicker foam is better? I may also look into heat tracing for a couple key lines.

- I'm going to create a plumbing emergency bucket: shutoff wrench, pipe cutter, assortment of Sharkbites, assortment of heater hoses, clamps, and PVC caps and plugs. Also some JB Water Weld. All that stuff is relatively cheap, but unobtainable within hours of a freeze around here. I'll buy extras for friends and neighbors.

- I really need to buy more fire extinguishers for the house. I've got one extinguisher of undetermined age/effectiveness. Between running my fireplace and having extension cords and space heaters strung through the house, I was a bit uneasy about the risk of fire.

- Having camping stuff is super useful for emergencies.

Anyway -- long post. Hope others are similarly getting back to normal.

Exactly how I got through the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. A Coleman stove was worth its' weight in gold.

This?

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2021/02/18/oncor-ends-controlled-outages-thousands-of-north-texans-still-without-power-due-to-equipment-damage/

I used to have one of these. Aren't they not to be used in an enclosed space for prolonged periods?

Even then without power and in an unconditioned space... POP. Had it happen. It was DAMN cold for 4 weeks straight a few years ago. I think we spent the entire month of January at below zero and I'm not kidding. It did not get above zero. I had water lines encapsulated in spray foam that popped. Didn't know till the water finally made its way out.

I have a Big Buddy that I'll use in an emergency. It has a fan that runs off of 4 D batteries. I've heated my 1000 s.f garage with two of them in the winter. Nice thing about the big buddy is that I figured out how to heat canned soup on it while using it in my hunting shack. I could live off of melted snow, Spaghettios and Dinty Moore Beef Stew!