> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable
Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow
Even in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked...
That said power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
Likely city vs rural.
I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.
How does that compare to Norway?
Yeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.
I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.
A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.
In the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.
In Sweden it also almost never happens but this year there was a hurricane like storm that fell lots of trees and thousands of people had no power for days. But yeah it wasn’t because of snow.
We have above ground power lines in the nordics too. They are just built to handle our climate.
Where I live (pacific northwest), it's not snow that's the problem, but windstorms. Presumably knocking over trees, which in turn takes down power lines - which of course implies said trees are tall, in proximity to the power lines, and not cut down. I maybe average 24 hours of outage per year (frequently less, but occasionally spiking to a multi-day outage.)
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
Yeah, it was interesting to see some above-ground-to-the-premises power delivery in some of the smaller Norwegian villages above the arctic circle. Things looked rather robust, though.
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
how?
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My parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines.
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
That is bad infrastructure problem. Not a necessary feature. Near freezing should be non issue.
In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
Even a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.
Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
all the ones I've seen when researching were lithium-ion from sketchy-looking brands, any brands you recommend?
Any recommendations about the boots?
Or what to check for?
I prefer military boots, they have no branding and are typically designed and tested for decent longevity and comfort. My current ones are Bundeswehr surplus, I believe Meindl produced them. They cost about 60 euros or so, never been used.
Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.
You can certainly get cheap Bundeswehr surplus boots, but you should know that soldiers don’t typically choose those if given a choice.
When given a choice, soldiers will tend to choose something like Salomon Toundra.
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
It really is something.
Of course, large commercial kitchens often have walk-in refrigerators and walk-in freezers.
In Yakutsk, you have an open-air walk-out freezer.
There are a few months in the summer when temperatures are similar to the Bay Area. I could probably wear my usual aloha shirts!
Living in a place that often drops down to insane temps, I am also obsessed with watching the YouTubes from there.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
It's not really meant to be advice. It's the author's own experience, ironically written as if it were advice.
For example:
"You did bleach ten gallons of well water for long-term storage already earlier in the year, right? Good."
This is sarcasm, because the author did not do that.
Ah I see. That didn’t translate well for me. Maybe because the title primed me into thinking that this was meant to be helpful.
It's obviously a self-depreciation/joke style.
There is some truth in it [that doesn't translate well over to some other part of the works]. It requires rather poor infrastructure to be present.
There has been snow for over 2 months here, with relatively low lows (-29C) but no issue like lack of electricity or water.
Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.
This is about _tankless_ toilets. They only work with electricity-powered flush pumps. That's why the author wrote about having to physically dump water into the toilet to flush it.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.
I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.
This is a common reaction to posts on the internet, including blogs and Hacker News comments.
Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.
Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.
I find it quite funny. I read it as if he is obnoxious towards himself, because the lessons presented are learned the hard way.
I'm in the foothills in Northern California, and I've never met anyone here that changes their ties out for winter. When there's chain controls, they'll let you through if you have winter rated tires, including all-season, and all-wheel drive, otherwise you need chains.
Everyone I know who drives a lot in the snow gets a vehicle with all-wheel drive and everyone else carries chains. (really they're cables, on a small vehicle)
The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.
I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.
Interesting, here in Sweden it’s mandatory to change tires. Once I did it a bit late and drove on some ice, just a little. The car was like on ice skates for a little while .
Driving discipline, culture, and rules in North America are Mickey Mouse.
The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …
I wonder if it's a carryover of an old regulation that used to make sense. Modern all-season tires are better in snow than the best winter tires were several decades ago.
Also, you need studs or chains to get traction on ice. The difference between a winter tire and a summer tire is the temperature range where the rubber stays flexible. When the rubber gets hard, it will keep its shape instead of complying with the surface of the road, so it loses traction quicker. Ice is flat, so there's no difference between tire types, and there's nothing to grip on to.
Nordic studless winter tires (different from Central European winter tires so also probably different from whatever you get in the US) do give some grip on ice, while all-seasons can be nearly as bad as summer tires. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
The government has done ongoing research on these subjects and the regulations do get renewed (e.g. some properly rated all-seasons are now allowed)
Indeed. The first thing I do when buying a second-hand car (I never buy new cars, what a waste of money) is to buy the best winter tires (and summer tires if needed) that money can buy (lots of that available, as I save so much on the car). I never have any problems in any conditions (and there are a lot of "conditions..")
All seasons tires are rubbish. Also the "new" ones (re sister comment).
Montana here. Everyone that can afford to changes their tires. Costco tire center is a s.show in November and May. Nobody uses chains except for un-maintained roads. Obviously nobody buys a 2WD vehicle here.
The writing tone is obviously self-deprecating.
Around this parts of Europe, they are mandatory.
Eh, all seasons do you just fine. Not worth the effort to put winter tires on, imo.
You’re right usually (about not needing blizzaks) but there’s important nuance here. There are warm all season (with usual M+S stamped on, this just means tread pattern, nothing about compound) and winter all-season with a compatible compound for cold conditions. The industry created a logo for the tires some years back it’s like 3 peak mountain snowflake or something. This ensures the compound is soft enough to keep gripping in freezing temperatures. It’s required in some jurisdictions (Quebec I think and maybe some lake effect zones)
There is lot of variation between tires. From summer, to all season, to European winter to Nordic winter(studdles or studded). Only Nordic ones designed specifically for snow and ice are really usable in conditions where there is often snow and ice. They fare worse in wet not freezing conditions and ofc in dry.
But not all winter tires are made equivalent.
I only trust studded tiers (but i live close to a non-paved road that is always very icy during the end of the season).
But that said - there are lots of research that points towards that studded tires kill more people than they save lives because of the asphalt particles they cause.
But then there are people that claim that non-studded cars rely on at least 10% cars with studded tires to make the surface more rugged/rough.
Anyway, down the rabbit hole.
Following an ambulance a couple years back I was up to 110 mph on my rather aggressive snow tires and was just fine. Not to say it wasn't a little worse, but I was fine. Everything you're saying is an exaggeration. A whole lot of people in snowy areas don't drive with snow tires and are usually fine. Good snow tires are a bit of a superpower up north but we all learn how to drive without them being a requirement outside of times where traveling at all is questionable.
Difference is pretty big if it’s icy like breaking 100 meters vs 10 meters. Especially if there’s wildlife like reindeers/moose’s you are going to do emergency breathing semi regularly.
If it's icy there's no difference at all. The only tyres that do anything on ice are the ones with spikes or chains.
If it's snowy a good modern all weather tyre can hold its own, but will brake a few feet later than a good winter tyre.
In all other conditions a good all weather is a lot better than winter tyres, and pretty close to a good summer tyre.
I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".
I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)
None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.
Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
You must live in Florida or be a terrible driver. The difference between winter and all seasons is very apparent.
Just pointing out - a lot of snowy areas are very aggressive about plowing (and salting). For most people this is probably like "don't drive tomorrow" and not some need for knobby snow tires.
It is.
However the difference between winter and a modern all weather (it's a different class) isn't.
And yes, we're probably terrible drivers.
I do not live in Florida. 45N, continental winters.
I'm never using winter tyres again unless society breaks down and no one shovels the roads anymore.
The main lesson I learned was I didn’t have to live in a snowy place. I left SW Michigan in 2000 and haven’t looked back. I don’t like being cold, but I loathe snow and ice.
I've lived all my life in Finland, even though all through my early adulthood I was planning to move to some place much warmer. But later (especially now with children for whom the snow is so exciting) I've come to like the four seasons and the balance it gives.
That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
Cold and dry is not a problem. You can always add more layers of clothing and get very comfortable.
Warm and humid is a real problem. You can't just remove clothing until you're comfortable. And the humidity.. there's no remedy to fix that.
The remedy is swim or air conditioning.
Swimming (where, by the way?) or air conditioning isn't helping when walking outside.
Yeah it is basically don't walk outside much when above 35C. Unless you are a weird person with a body that can handle a 10km run in such conditions! Not me.
I hate bugs, I specifically like late autumn/winter/early spring cold times because there are almost no bugs. I don't mind snow/ice as much.
+1 I grew up in CA, went to college in IL and couldn't move back fast enough!
I've found used snowboarding gear is best for when you need to muck around in the snow.
Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.
Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.
Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.
When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.
Or get a snow blower.
If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.
A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?
Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.
It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.
I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.
I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.
I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.
Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.
I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.
Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.
> I live very near a hospital
Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.
I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.
Trees fall down due to combination of heavy snow and wind. They probably don't cut sufficiently around power lines. It is extra bad if the ground hasn't frozen properly yet.
In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.
But why are power lines above ground in the first place?
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Just to add, a lot of the midwestern USA is very swampy.
Makes them a lot easier to get to. Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
A lineman can fix anything on a pole within a few hours. Probably before lunch if they start first thing in the AM. Fixing a buried line can take days or worse depending on what's above it.
> Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
Or if you want to upgrade it. My local electricity provider charges an order of magnitude more for upgrading home electrical service for more amperage if your service line is buried.
cost, it’s way more expensive to dig. more red tape.
I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.
Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
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All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.
Ice on power lines. It's the freezing rain mix in just the right conditions that builds up ice on anything and takes down lines.
Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.
One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts.
I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.
I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
8: that's why you have sharper slopes on the roof if you expect a lot of snow. Then it glide off.
We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.
It can also be structural. Depending on the elevation, my county mandates houses be designed to survive wind speeds up to 157 miles per hour and snow loads up to 545 pounds per square foot. That means a flat roof would have to be built like a parking garage floor, but a sloped roof can transfer that weight to the exterior walls, and an true A-frame directly transfers the load to the ground.
Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
One thing this article doesn’t cover (but probably should): shoveling snow has a fairly high risk of heart attacks (especially past 50):
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
Here in Finland there are a lot of people brought to hospital due to heart attacks whilst shoveling snow.
I didn't expect that, though I can't claim to be surprised by the number of elderly people who go to casualty due to falling on ice.
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
+1, I learnt too late how useful a brush is, also for clearing small puffy snowfalls much faster than shovelling
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.
For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
24. Check your attic. If snow blows in there because your roof is damaged then it will melt and slowly turn your entire house into fungi. The damage to your roof can be so tiny you wouldn't spot it and your attic could still fill up during a snow storm.
It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.
This is a concern of mine, and my attics (3 of them due to the way the house is built) are pretty inconvenient to check, so I put some battery-powered temp/humidity sensors in them.
Haven't gotten around to setting up any alerting thresholds though... I'm not actually entirely sure what temp/humidity thresholds would actually be useful.
Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.
Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I think the bigger problem is that many of the tourists don't normally spend time outside, so they are used to only having enough gear for a heated building or car, even at home.
I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.
I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable
Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow
Even in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked...
That said power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
Likely city vs rural.
I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.
How does that compare to Norway?
Yeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.
I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.
A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.
https://satwcomic.com/you-re-hot-then-you-re-cold
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.
In the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.
In Sweden it also almost never happens but this year there was a hurricane like storm that fell lots of trees and thousands of people had no power for days. But yeah it wasn’t because of snow.
We have above ground power lines in the nordics too. They are just built to handle our climate.
Where I live (pacific northwest), it's not snow that's the problem, but windstorms. Presumably knocking over trees, which in turn takes down power lines - which of course implies said trees are tall, in proximity to the power lines, and not cut down. I maybe average 24 hours of outage per year (frequently less, but occasionally spiking to a multi-day outage.)
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
Yeah, it was interesting to see some above-ground-to-the-premises power delivery in some of the smaller Norwegian villages above the arctic circle. Things looked rather robust, though.
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
how?
My parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines.
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
That is bad infrastructure problem. Not a necessary feature. Near freezing should be non issue.
In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
Even a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.
Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
This guy has mastered the art of dressing for winter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG3WfCWU9D0
> battery-heated versions
all the ones I've seen when researching were lithium-ion from sketchy-looking brands, any brands you recommend?
Any recommendations about the boots? Or what to check for?
I prefer military boots, they have no branding and are typically designed and tested for decent longevity and comfort. My current ones are Bundeswehr surplus, I believe Meindl produced them. They cost about 60 euros or so, never been used.
Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.
You can certainly get cheap Bundeswehr surplus boots, but you should know that soldiers don’t typically choose those if given a choice.
When given a choice, soldiers will tend to choose something like Salomon Toundra.
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:
24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68
How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc
How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHbsYYELV94
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
It really is something.
Of course, large commercial kitchens often have walk-in refrigerators and walk-in freezers.
In Yakutsk, you have an open-air walk-out freezer.
There are a few months in the summer when temperatures are similar to the Bay Area. I could probably wear my usual aloha shirts!
Living in a place that often drops down to insane temps, I am also obsessed with watching the YouTubes from there.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
It's not really meant to be advice. It's the author's own experience, ironically written as if it were advice.
For example:
"You did bleach ten gallons of well water for long-term storage already earlier in the year, right? Good."
This is sarcasm, because the author did not do that.
Ah I see. That didn’t translate well for me. Maybe because the title primed me into thinking that this was meant to be helpful.
It's obviously a self-depreciation/joke style.
There is some truth in it [that doesn't translate well over to some other part of the works]. It requires rather poor infrastructure to be present.
There has been snow for over 2 months here, with relatively low lows (-29C) but no issue like lack of electricity or water.
Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.
This is about _tankless_ toilets. They only work with electricity-powered flush pumps. That's why the author wrote about having to physically dump water into the toilet to flush it.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.
I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.
This is a common reaction to posts on the internet, including blogs and Hacker News comments.
Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.
Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.
I find it quite funny. I read it as if he is obnoxious towards himself, because the lessons presented are learned the hard way.
I'm in the foothills in Northern California, and I've never met anyone here that changes their ties out for winter. When there's chain controls, they'll let you through if you have winter rated tires, including all-season, and all-wheel drive, otherwise you need chains.
Everyone I know who drives a lot in the snow gets a vehicle with all-wheel drive and everyone else carries chains. (really they're cables, on a small vehicle)
The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.
I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.
Interesting, here in Sweden it’s mandatory to change tires. Once I did it a bit late and drove on some ice, just a little. The car was like on ice skates for a little while .
Driving discipline, culture, and rules in North America are Mickey Mouse.
The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …
I wonder if it's a carryover of an old regulation that used to make sense. Modern all-season tires are better in snow than the best winter tires were several decades ago.
Also, you need studs or chains to get traction on ice. The difference between a winter tire and a summer tire is the temperature range where the rubber stays flexible. When the rubber gets hard, it will keep its shape instead of complying with the surface of the road, so it loses traction quicker. Ice is flat, so there's no difference between tire types, and there's nothing to grip on to.
Nordic studless winter tires (different from Central European winter tires so also probably different from whatever you get in the US) do give some grip on ice, while all-seasons can be nearly as bad as summer tires. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
The government has done ongoing research on these subjects and the regulations do get renewed (e.g. some properly rated all-seasons are now allowed)
Indeed. The first thing I do when buying a second-hand car (I never buy new cars, what a waste of money) is to buy the best winter tires (and summer tires if needed) that money can buy (lots of that available, as I save so much on the car). I never have any problems in any conditions (and there are a lot of "conditions..")
All seasons tires are rubbish. Also the "new" ones (re sister comment).
Montana here. Everyone that can afford to changes their tires. Costco tire center is a s.show in November and May. Nobody uses chains except for un-maintained roads. Obviously nobody buys a 2WD vehicle here.
The writing tone is obviously self-deprecating.
Around this parts of Europe, they are mandatory.
Eh, all seasons do you just fine. Not worth the effort to put winter tires on, imo.
You’re right usually (about not needing blizzaks) but there’s important nuance here. There are warm all season (with usual M+S stamped on, this just means tread pattern, nothing about compound) and winter all-season with a compatible compound for cold conditions. The industry created a logo for the tires some years back it’s like 3 peak mountain snowflake or something. This ensures the compound is soft enough to keep gripping in freezing temperatures. It’s required in some jurisdictions (Quebec I think and maybe some lake effect zones)
There is lot of variation between tires. From summer, to all season, to European winter to Nordic winter(studdles or studded). Only Nordic ones designed specifically for snow and ice are really usable in conditions where there is often snow and ice. They fare worse in wet not freezing conditions and ofc in dry.
But not all winter tires are made equivalent.
I only trust studded tiers (but i live close to a non-paved road that is always very icy during the end of the season).
But that said - there are lots of research that points towards that studded tires kill more people than they save lives because of the asphalt particles they cause.
But then there are people that claim that non-studded cars rely on at least 10% cars with studded tires to make the surface more rugged/rough.
Anyway, down the rabbit hole.
Following an ambulance a couple years back I was up to 110 mph on my rather aggressive snow tires and was just fine. Not to say it wasn't a little worse, but I was fine. Everything you're saying is an exaggeration. A whole lot of people in snowy areas don't drive with snow tires and are usually fine. Good snow tires are a bit of a superpower up north but we all learn how to drive without them being a requirement outside of times where traveling at all is questionable.
Difference is pretty big if it’s icy like breaking 100 meters vs 10 meters. Especially if there’s wildlife like reindeers/moose’s you are going to do emergency breathing semi regularly.
If it's icy there's no difference at all. The only tyres that do anything on ice are the ones with spikes or chains.
If it's snowy a good modern all weather tyre can hold its own, but will brake a few feet later than a good winter tyre.
In all other conditions a good all weather is a lot better than winter tyres, and pretty close to a good summer tyre.
I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".
I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)
None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.
Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
There are also actual studies that show the difference https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-66968-2_...
You must live in Florida or be a terrible driver. The difference between winter and all seasons is very apparent.
Just pointing out - a lot of snowy areas are very aggressive about plowing (and salting). For most people this is probably like "don't drive tomorrow" and not some need for knobby snow tires.
It is.
However the difference between winter and a modern all weather (it's a different class) isn't.
And yes, we're probably terrible drivers.
I do not live in Florida. 45N, continental winters.
I'm never using winter tyres again unless society breaks down and no one shovels the roads anymore.
The main lesson I learned was I didn’t have to live in a snowy place. I left SW Michigan in 2000 and haven’t looked back. I don’t like being cold, but I loathe snow and ice.
I've lived all my life in Finland, even though all through my early adulthood I was planning to move to some place much warmer. But later (especially now with children for whom the snow is so exciting) I've come to like the four seasons and the balance it gives.
That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
Cold and dry is not a problem. You can always add more layers of clothing and get very comfortable.
Warm and humid is a real problem. You can't just remove clothing until you're comfortable. And the humidity.. there's no remedy to fix that.
The remedy is swim or air conditioning.
Swimming (where, by the way?) or air conditioning isn't helping when walking outside.
Yeah it is basically don't walk outside much when above 35C. Unless you are a weird person with a body that can handle a 10km run in such conditions! Not me.
I hate bugs, I specifically like late autumn/winter/early spring cold times because there are almost no bugs. I don't mind snow/ice as much.
+1 I grew up in CA, went to college in IL and couldn't move back fast enough!
I've found used snowboarding gear is best for when you need to muck around in the snow.
Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.
Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.
Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.
When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.
Or get a snow blower.
If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.
A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?
Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.
It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.
I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.
I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.
I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.
Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.
I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.
Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.
> I live very near a hospital
Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.
I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.
Trees fall down due to combination of heavy snow and wind. They probably don't cut sufficiently around power lines. It is extra bad if the ground hasn't frozen properly yet.
In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.
But why are power lines above ground in the first place?
Just to add, a lot of the midwestern USA is very swampy.
Makes them a lot easier to get to. Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
A lineman can fix anything on a pole within a few hours. Probably before lunch if they start first thing in the AM. Fixing a buried line can take days or worse depending on what's above it.
> Buried infrastructure is fantastic until it breaks. Then it really sucks ass.
Or if you want to upgrade it. My local electricity provider charges an order of magnitude more for upgrading home electrical service for more amperage if your service line is buried.
cost, it’s way more expensive to dig. more red tape.
I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.
Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.
Ice on power lines. It's the freezing rain mix in just the right conditions that builds up ice on anything and takes down lines.
Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.
One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts. I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.
I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
8: that's why you have sharper slopes on the roof if you expect a lot of snow. Then it glide off.
We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.
It can also be structural. Depending on the elevation, my county mandates houses be designed to survive wind speeds up to 157 miles per hour and snow loads up to 545 pounds per square foot. That means a flat roof would have to be built like a parking garage floor, but a sloped roof can transfer that weight to the exterior walls, and an true A-frame directly transfers the load to the ground.
Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
One thing this article doesn’t cover (but probably should): shoveling snow has a fairly high risk of heart attacks (especially past 50):
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/snow-shoveling-can-be-hazard...
I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
Here in Finland there are a lot of people brought to hospital due to heart attacks whilst shoveling snow.
I didn't expect that, though I can't claim to be surprised by the number of elderly people who go to casualty due to falling on ice.
Cold weather itself increases the chance of heart attacks. Heat waves get all of the news coverage, but cold weather is the real killer: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
+1, I learnt too late how useful a brush is, also for clearing small puffy snowfalls much faster than shovelling
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.
For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
24. Check your attic. If snow blows in there because your roof is damaged then it will melt and slowly turn your entire house into fungi. The damage to your roof can be so tiny you wouldn't spot it and your attic could still fill up during a snow storm.
It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.
This is a concern of mine, and my attics (3 of them due to the way the house is built) are pretty inconvenient to check, so I put some battery-powered temp/humidity sensors in them.
Haven't gotten around to setting up any alerting thresholds though... I'm not actually entirely sure what temp/humidity thresholds would actually be useful.
Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.
Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I think the bigger problem is that many of the tourists don't normally spend time outside, so they are used to only having enough gear for a heated building or car, even at home.
I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
Also, sunlight improves your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYnUPxG7ONk
> starts to feel like cope
In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.
I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.