Dealing with the cold
 

Unlike some of the west coast guys and southerners, we are driven into basements and other heated spaces from un-heat-able garages and barns, etc. Our gray pud-tat still keeps the mice out of the garage , so I have his box triple insulated and at a window to catch sun-heat and take him fresh water and food 2X a day.

I just got done with a pair of RCA CTC16' color chassis, which I set up a jig for on a solid basement stone laundry sink. I have a 4-foot fluorescent light above it at the a wall, where the schematics hang for quick note-taking.

Heat is from a dryer 6 feet away and I do the laundry as an excuse to be down there:D . The dryer is a electric 1964 Montgomery Ward Signature that has a flip-down lint filter door along its bottom to divert damp warm air into the room instead of the 4" metal vent out the basement window. Its the basement so I could care less about lint blowing around too.

Unfortunately the older, fat indoor cat ignores mice incursions, so I have to set traps.:sigh:

Do not try this with a gas dryer because it needs to vent the products of combustion outdoors.

During the summer months the garage becomes a staging area for swap meets, a decontamination (mom's deathly afraid of getting roaches so every thing that ain't new stays in the garage overnight) zone for acquisitions, repository for tools for working on my car, and storage for various things the folks have...Every winter it gets cleared into the basement primarily so the cars can be parked.

Around 70% of the basement is mine. It tends to be cooler than the rest of the house, but the heat does work down there. The whole place is well lit so I can find things and work easily (my work bench is down there), got TVs, video games and audio gear so it is easy to relax.

Winter here tends to bring in the mice occasionally. It was much worse when there was still a farm field at the end of the block (it's housing now). Back when our cat was alive we did not need to worry about mice...They knew she was there and did not enter. One observation I've come upon from having multiple cats over the years is that mice will avoid a place with a cat till the cat is reaching it's final years...Once they sense the cat is no longer fit to pursue/catch them they are no longer scared off.

:thmbsp:great observation - 8 to 10 years is their "service life" for that benefit. I've noticed that over 45 years and a dozen cats but no more than 3 at any given time (also had 4 dogs in succession until 2001, but want another).

What's a basement? Here our water table is only a foot deep...

We run shallow wells - 10 feet to a lifetime of water....

My attached garage is heated, so my woodworking bench becomes a pressed into service electronics bench....

There was a piece on tonight's' news about old folks going without heat - running space heaters because they can't afford heating oil. One lady slept in a wet suit, with sweats on over the wet suit. Scary and sad.

Must be nice to live in a normal climate. My window A/C is on right now.

Living here I've done that this time of year too....When you run 2-3 tube TVs at once for 4-5 hours in a small closed room in an apartment, the people on the floor below like it HOT, the window is VERY hard to get to open, and you need it COLD to get to sleep you will know why...

Big hoo-ah on the TV about a big freeze up & heavy snow on it's way here in England, all we have here in Nottingham area today is light rain & 5 degrees Celsius, about normal for this time of year. Woke up on 2'nd of Jan to a very frozen car that had been left in a hotel car park at Stafford we were staying in since 29'th Dec, of course I couldn't find the de-icer spray grr grr. A Co-op shop was round the corner so bought some from there then found some under the front seat, I wasted a pound grr grr. Car is kept in a garage so not used to it freezing. My radios & TV's are kept in a heated spare bedroom..

Like other animals around here I hibernate. I hate winter.
This ones been easy so far, only abt 2 ft of snow & most
is melting away. Right now abt 50 F, time for the beach !
Will be back down below 0 F tomorrow nite.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Been to Florida, Mallorca & Canary Islands in middle of winter & loved the warmer weather, would love to move to one of them places but Wife & I have got pre-existing health conditions so Florida is out. Other 2 are part of Spain & visa & healthcare entitlement is up in the air with Brexit coming up..

It's been like that around here. It rained on Tuesday and the temp went to freezing, so the roads got icey, then turned to snow. Got to my workshop and the drive was icey glazed. Went to the hardware store for salt. It was raining and above freezing. Three hours later the temp dropped about ten degrees and my car was glazed over with ice. The ice wouldn't budge, it was so thick.
They claim, the windshield washer fluid doesn't work, when it gets old, as the alcohol evaporates from the engine heat. It didn't work very well. :sigh:

No basements here in AZ - I couldn't move consoles up and down anyway.
We will be getting a little taste of "winter" this weekend, highs in 50's (F), and rain.
South facing garage door is a dark color and not insulated. On most days, I can open the door from garage to house, set up the box fan, and blow free heat into the house. Of course, in summer, it's a real detriment.

Funny how that weather is same here 8-hours south, but no sun either :sigh: at least I did not need a coat today. We had 3 inches of snow last weekend but now its just rain.

Me & my big mouth (see # 7) it's been snowing over night & it's white over. Of course the country will come to a standstill, trains wont run, planes wont fly. Slightest bit of snow in England & the place go's to pot. We're totally useless when it snows as we don't get it very often. One year most of the snow plows & gritter/road salt spreader trucks wouldn't start & the mororways ground to a halt, lol..

Dont feel bad the same thing happens here and we are used to storms
that will drop 1-3 feet in a day ! Could be worse, could be up here.
https://www.mountwashington.org/expe...onditions.aspx

73 from the colonies
Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

When we have bad weather in England the government/prime minister always gets the blame, it's as though they can control the weather. We had massive thunderstorms & floods in summer: was govt's fault of course. Our road floods every time there's a storm, the storm drains have collapsed through mining subsidence, the local council say the water company should repair them, & the water company say the council should, so nothing gets done. Lucky for me my driveway rises from the road so flood water doesn't affect my house or garage just the bottom of driveway..

I guess I shouldnt have complained about winter. Today
I went out to get some Irish food ( ale & potato chips).
Two days of 50 degF weather has thawed the roads & they
are all MUD ! What a damn mess..... Cant wait til they freeze agn.
Mud season isnt for 6 weeks.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Here's something that will help y'all deal with that horrible cold...

Well the snow didn't last long as it's all gone. It's 5 degrees C here today. Been mending windstorm damage: a perspex panel blew out of the greenhouse & vanished, looked everywhere for it but it's gone, had to make a new panel out of a large sheet I've got. A perspex panel on the canopy was flapping about so went up & banged a few nails in. I was going to use screws but couldn't find my electric screwdriver as it's buried under a load of junk somewhere in the garage, I'm too lazy to use a proper screwdriver. My wife supervised & shouted at me for forgetting to put my tools away, I'm such a bad boy, lol..

That's my worst habit, never puting things away, especially tools. I have tools scattered between my home basement, garage, my workshop and warehouse, which is eleven miles away.
BTW, is Perspex is the same as our Plexiglas or Lexan? :scratch2:

Yes perspex & plexiglas are the same stuff, think perspex is some kind of trade name. We seem to name things in England after their trade name. My vacuum cleaners are Vax & a Dyson makes but I always say "I'm going to hoover the carpets!" & "my cat is so greedy he hoovered all his food up!" My friends got a very greedy dog & she's called him Hoover, her other dogs called Dustbin, lol..

Reminds me of a fellow from India that was on my senior design team in college...He had this weird word for Styrofoam, that IIRC began with a P.

I think "styrofoam" is just a trade name for a type of polystyrene, maybe it was that.

I expect to see you in the morning at the WARCI meet, Dave! :thmbsp:

Then there are lunatics that actually prefer the cold, myself included :D
I'm in my element when it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. Hell, that's part of the reason I'm praying the brass lets me return to the United States sooner rather than later. Continental Europe is much too mild.

Amen bro. :thmbsp: It's a bit below that threshold here right now thank goodness, so it was worth going out even though Canadian Tire had closed early for a staff function. After all I was overheated and covered in sawdust. I just took a detour to Starbucks on the way back.

I'm in Chicago, so we get plenty cold here. Dealing with it? I just bring my dirty / contaminated / infested items to my shop first. Use the air supply to blow out dust and just let it go everywhere. With two 300k btu waste oil fired heaters, warmth is available at the touch of a thermostat.

Then whatever heap I'm tinkering with comes home to my bedroom workbench, where I put ponies on them and take pictures for you folks to enjoy my misery as much as I do.

It was not polystyrene...Me and the rest of the team would have recognized that....It was some odd word that none of us had heard of...He practically had to do verbal charades for us to figure out what he was talking about.

Yeah, I kinda wanted to go as a seller as of yesterday morning (needed to fix and gather a load)....Then a computer repair started dragging out, and a fellow called me about taking a load of TV (I presumed he meant Sunday, but he really meant same day), I ended up getting a whole hoard of TVs....Then as there was still a bit of hope of scratching together a selling load a friend called and wanted to hang out....Long story short I never got to prepping to sell (the main reason I had to go to that meet), or finishing that computer.:D:dunno:

I really should not be buying more stuff, or spending money right now...

Thermocal?

http://www.herebeanswers.com/2010/02...facturing.html

jr

Seems all of you have it good during Winter. Our Winter usually has temps anywhere from -40 C to -20 C on average but sometimes it can hit -50.Snow I try to forget but it is always here,Blizzards come and go with drifts you wouldn't believe but otherwise it's great:)

I'm not a fan of the cold.I better start digging my way into the cut grass/leave pile to keep warm this winter like the frog I disturbed a few days ago in the the cut grass/leave pile.The poor thing launched out and hopped across the lawn like Grant took Richmond for cover. He was pretty big too.The same thing happen a few years ago when I disturbed a garter snake around this time as i was raking around the tree in the front yard.If he/she was a venomous snake .I'll be running for cover.

I am 30 miles east of Cleveland and about a mile from the south shore of Lake Erie. Our winters can be bad (we had a horrendous blizzard in 1978), but it usually isn't too terrible. When the wind blows in off the lake, it can get very cold, sometimes below zero (but not as cold as in Minnesota, and I don't want to think how cold it gets in International Falls). The last time I remember the temperature that cold around here was a year or two ago, when I think it dropped to -15 for a day or so. Being as close to the lake as I am, I've gotten used to this type of cold snap, and yes, we did have one snowstorm a couple years ago that dumped about six inches of the white stuff on our town, but mostly we don't get that much. Since snowstorms ordinarily go for high elevation areas, this town normally won't see a lot but there have been exceptions. There is an area (Geauga County, Ohio), about 10 miles south of here, however, in which high snow accumulations are the rule rather than the exception. The area gets so much snow (more than we do) because its elevation is very high. The same thing happens west of Cleveland in some areas, again due to the higher elevation, although as a rule there is much less snow west of the city during anything but a severe storm or blizzard. During the blizzard of 1978, much of Cleveland and surrounding areas were all but shut down (I personally had a foot of snow in front of my garage door, and my next-door neighbor had snow halfway up the side door of her house). It was truly a blizzard not to be forgotten, and believe me, if you went through it, you would never forget it! I know I won't.

We finally dropped below 0c this morning. Thermometer was reading -0.7.
We typically do not see wet winters here. The snow tends to be quite dry and blows about when you get a few good days of cold, so as soon as the leaves fall you should be shutting down, tarping up and winterizing anything that you don't want to get filled with snow. What that does mean however is that humidity rarely goes above 30% unless a Pineapple Express rolls through.
We had a nice and cold winter last year. We were seeing -25 as late as February.

The way this years hurricanes hit everybody down south.I think we up here in New England will get its share of blizzards this winter.

This again already?! Holy crap!

I'm seriously considering getting a "I love winter" button for my coat just to stop complete strangers from complaining to me. I just started going outside again without actually needing to.

I just got a vintage Kenmore window A/C unit and chances are I'll be getting a second one. The classifieds were loaded with A/C units fairly recently but very few were worth buying. If I have to put up with the heat I'm doing so in style. I grabbed a newer one for free nearby back in June, the ad said it wasn't cooling like it used to but it got us through the summer. Once I got the Kenmore and verified it working I contacted an independent recycler to haul the other one away. The stuffed shirts running the provincial recycling program are way too picky about what they'll take.

It IS easy being green as long as one knows how to turn a wrench and isn't wasteful.

We have central air, but I still pick up any window units I come across. 9 times out of 10, if it doesn't work, it's just because the condenser is filled with dirt. Nothing a garden hose can't fix in 5 minutes. I think I've literally seen... like 2 window units with bad compressors. Scores of them with dirty condensers.

The compressor in the one I got rid of was fine. I flushed out the condenser and evaporator coils even though they didn't look dirty and straightened the bent condenser fins which made no appreciable difference. At the end of the season I stored it in a closet which caused a weird odor in there. Once it was out of there for a couple of days and the floor mopped the smell was gone. Slow refrigerant leak perhaps? It was Chinese-made and used R410A, nothing to sneeze at anyway.

Now if something goes wrong with the old Kenmore it'll be worth fixing to me.

Our plains winters can be variable. Last year was mostly warm and dry. We never had more than 1 inch of snow per session. It's forecast to be the same this winter. Don't get me wrong; I love snow especially heavy snow. Here in the "sticks" it looks it Currier and Ives during big snows. Most of you are still in the workforce and dread heavy snow including cleanup. I don't blame you. If you get snowbound turn on the TV and watch Christmas DVDs.

Depending on the local culture that might actually get ya more jazz from the man on the street...

You should visit Florida in about mid January when it's coldest (50's-60's) everybody is dressed in sweaters and jackets and complaining about freezing their buts off...It is kinda funny seeing that when ya come from 4 seasons land (Frankie Valley not included :D ).

Yeah than goodness for cheap and plentiful natural gas, and well insulated houses! Pretty soon the furnace will be working overtime keeping the house nice and cozy.

I think a lot of the dislike for cold has to do with being poorly prepared for it.. If you've got good insulation, a good heating system, warm clothes, lined boots, and remember to warm up your car, it isn't so bad.,

I always like how winter kills all the bugs, and germs... I figure it's like a natural sterilization process to keep everything in check. As much as I can complain about the cold, I tend to get sick every time I spend too much time in a hot climate.