The Big Chill

 It’s not funny anymore! Things got serious here last night. 

About seven PM the lights went out and the furnace, of course, shut down. We already had the water trickling in the kitchen sink because the pipes run along the west side of this house, just inside the skirting.

The skirting is fairly substantial, with rocks grouted to the bottom of the house all the way around, and the hot water heater is at one end of the house, and the kitchen sink is at the other end, so a trickle of hot water will keep all the pipes toasty - as long as the electric hot water heater has electricity.

We heat this house with propane, and I just put 300 gallons in the tank last week, so that isn’t the problem. The heat from the fire is distributed through the house by an electric fan, and we soon started feeling the cold coming through the walls. 

I have a small tailgate generator in the garage, but I can’t find the amperage rating on the fan motor. One of my plans for the future is to hook up that generator and see if it can handle the load. If not, I may have to buy a bigger one. If I hard wire a double pole/double throw switch to an outside receptacle, I could keep just the furnace alive without electrocuting any linemen working on the service feed outside. 

I’ll have to check with a licensed electrician before I make that move. 

I called the emergency hotline to the power company, and I listened to a recorded message telling me that there was trouble in the Kirsey switchyard and they had people working on restoring power, but no estimate on when they would get the power back on. 

When the power dropped out, it tried to reclose three times, but popped open immediately, as if it was a dead short to ground somewhere. No wind was blowing, and no ice was building up on the trees or wires, so I was baffled as to the cause of the outage.

There were two brief minutes of power about two hours later, but the lights went back out within a minute, leaving us in the dark. I went out to the motor home and retrieved a battery powered lantern with LED lights, which will make light for 20 hours or so.

We sat in the dim light getting colder and colder until about five hours had passed and we were beginning to shiver. Wilma, my sister-in-law, had offered us a warm place to stay the night if the power didn’t come back on, and the power company still had no estimate on power coming back.

The hot water trickle in the kitchen sink was slowly going cold as the water heater filled with cold water. It was near midnight when we decided it was time to abandon the house. I retrieved a couple of bottles of alcohol that Darlene had just bought, and I poured a full bottle of each in the toilet bowls for antifreeze, made sure the water was still trickling in the kitchen sink, just hoping that circulating water at ground temperature might prevent a total freeze up.

We drove over to Wilma’s house and woke her up. She graciously offered us couches and recliners and blankets for the night. I went to sleep in a recliner with ugly thoughts of busted pipes and water spraying all over the house when the power came back on and thawed the pipes.

When I awoke at about eight AM I called the power company again and instead of the recorded message, I was surprised to hear an actual live person. She could not tell me about the outage status, but she took down my number if they needed to contact me.

Darlene and I drove back out to the house at 10 AM and were thrilled to see the power was back on in the house. The water was still trickling in the kitchen sink, and I opened and purged every faucet in the house - no ice found - and both toilets were intact and functional. 

The time on the electric range was 6:00, so I know the power came on six hours earlier, at about 4:20 AM. That’s about nine hours and twenty minutes chilling in the dark.

We drove back to Wilma’s house and got Poppy, Darlene’s dog, and also her cell phone. The roads are snow packed and rutted, so we dragged the bottom of the car in town, which had not seen a snow plow yet. 

Wilma’s house is on the other side of a creek (bayou) with a steep grade on both sides, so getting across involved a lot of momentum, because with packed snow and ice there was no traction. I measured the south slope a year ago when I was installing a gate next to the road, and found it’s a 13 1/2 % slope.

Last night on the way into town a tow truck was extricating a small sedan out of the median that had slid off the road near Walmart. This morning there was white Ford pickup in the same spot with his flashers going, because when he tried to move on the banked curve, it just slid sideways toward the median. There is a banked curve there, with a stop light in the middle of the curve. Somebody needs to send a traffic engineer back to school. If you are required to stop halfway around a curve, they should not bank the curve.

I pulled around the pickup when he stopped sliding, and had no trouble on the rest of the trip home. Everybody here likes pickups, but when the roads are icy there is nothing more helpless than an empty pickup. All the weight is at the front and all the wheels pushing are at the other end in the back.

So this morning I’m proud of my little Mazda3. It went everywhere I needed to drive in the ice and snow, and drove around several other cars and pickups with no trouble at all. I’m pretty proud of this old house, too. It came through the freeze up with no damage at all to the piping anywhere. 

I’m ready for a hot shower now.