The stupidity is having an all-electric home. Electricity is terrible to heat with.
My dad lived out in the country. There was no natural gas to be had. Propane, like having your own tank and taking delivery, wasn't cheap. So, he had a nice wood-burning fireplace that he ran all day.
At night they used that magical invention called a heating blanket.
We watched a video earlier today where a guy puts a wick in a can of crisco, puts that in a terra cotta saucer, puts 3 clay feet on the saucer rim, and then stacked progressively smaller terra cotta pots upside down until it came to a point at the top. It looked like a traffic cone. It got to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. If you had one of those, minus rambunctious kids and pets, you’d be set.
The terra cotta pots don't add any heat to the room. The flame from the oil adds all the heat. The pots absorb the heat and radiate the heat into the room. Save money on pots and burn the candles by themselves. The same amount of heat will fill the room.
Electricity isn't stupid or terrible if you (a) live in a country where the govt isn't feverishly working to destroy everything about your way of life and (b) have a home over 2000 sq ft. You can't heat a decent-sized house with high ceilings using a wood stove. What are you going to do, get up every hour throughout the night to stoke the fire?
At night they used that magical invention called a heating blanket.
A magical wood-burning heating blanket, we assume? LOL we use an electric blanket instead.
I hated dealing with propane at my previous address. We love our spacious all-electric home, 1000 sq ft smaller yet still way too big for a wood stove to handle.
Is electricity for everyone? Clearly not. Does that mean it's stupid? Not for everyone, it isn't.
You must be smarter than anyone else. A rank of wood is 90-120 bucks if you dont own a forest electric heat Is cheaper than all.other forms of heating. I own 2 fully electric homes.
Electricity is fantastic, especially if you produce your own. Solar, wind turbines, petro generators all have their place. Electricity is very versatile. For heating, I use natural gas. I have electric heat upstairs, but I don't use it because it is terribly inefficient. I also have a wood burning stove insert in the fireplace in the living room. The key is to have multiple means. All these folks that are all in on any singular solution can end up in a jam. One is none and two is one is a common Marine Corps saying. I just take it a bit further and say, have as many solutions to any problem as you can manage.
Many trees are cut down in the summer. Just ask for some and people are more than happy to give it away for free. I have pulled my car over many times and loaded up at the most unexpected times. And it’s fun!
They are AMAZING. I have an insert in my living room surrounded by bricks. You can place a pot on top and keep water warm. It works so well even at the lowest flue opening, that I can open my back door in the middle of an ice storm and my interior will still be at least 70 degrees. When power goes out, you can even burn wood down to coals and use it as an oven. I made a pizza in mine once lol.
They work so well compared to electric heat that sometimes my guests complain it's almost "too hot" when I have a fire going lol.
There is no comparison to the holistic nature of wood heat. The warmth surrounds you like a blanket. You can tell the difference between heat from a fireplace and electric heat from wall units.
Yep, I don't mind a little wood smoke aroma inside my house. It gets me vibin' like I'm in a cabin in the woods even when I live in the middle of suburbia lol.
Now that I've thought about it for many seconds, I wonder if it's because a hot wood stove blasts the room with more than just hot air... There's IR radiation coming off that thing too. That's why I point different sides of myself at it...
Lol people die in Florida if it gets to 60°. It's 10 below in Ohio right now, and breezy. I'm supposed to be in Florida now but got a funeral, then I'm a vapor trail.
I've found that the best way to be efficient with your interior burns is to only open the vent the absolute minimum to maintain your wood's burn, and also using a hybrid method of firelogs and actual wood. I like to use 1 Tacoma firelog and 2 regular splits. The firelog will maintain your fire base while you add 1 split at a time after getting your inital fire going.
Powerlineman here retired, nothing beats a wood burner after I've been out in it for 16 hrs with 8 to rest and do it again. Now I get to sit next to it without the work part 😆
Many of these stupid assholes are people who vote for green new deal conservationism, and yes Texas is not exempt from this stupidity. This is demonstrated over the last decade where thousands of domestic migrants (people from other states, namely blue states) move into Texas and then vote for the same shit that ruined the place they moved from.
Iwhere I am it's currently -18f with a low of -25f it's a killing cold, it's been like this all week and there are places in the state that will get even colder. We know how to deal with it, this is a normal part of winter for ND.
But ,
Have some compassion I do whenever I hear about regions being colder than normal because they're not prepared.
There are nursing homes and hospitals and homeless that will suffer the worst of it. Not to mention wildlife and animals, as well as plants in southern regions.
Lol I've worked customer service or retail for over 20 years now I work for the DoT if anyone has a right to be jaded with the public it's me. But I try to take each person as an individual instead of judging the whole.
I've always been that way.
Lol you would be surprised. I have spoke to and had customers not just from across the country but across the world.
I've done everything from customer service for a well known catalog company,to taking calls from vets for the WWII memorial. My work has been anything but boring, lol.
This is always a treacherous time of year for some when the cold comes, not to mention the stray animals out there. It is bitter here in east Tennessee, but I remember when I lived in Iowa and that bone-chilling, crippling cold would set in. I had to work in it, on telecommunications equipment. There were days when numbness was the norm, but you have to work to pay the bills.
The farmers are the true heroes. The work they do is phenomenal. However, that is not without tragedy. I had a good friend who was a farmer, good family man, owned a 400-acre corn farm. So, he's out working on the farm and goes home at sunset, and it was 5 degrees. His wife [she was kind of a standoffish bitch] told him she didn't love him anymore. He was crushed, all that he worked for was for naught, he felt broken. I called to see how he was doing and she told me "he went out." I figure he might have gone to a bar, but I didn't know which one. Still hadn't heard from him after a couple of days, then a story comes on the local news about how this guy was found sitting in his truck on a lonely road out in the country. He drove out there [lows were from 10 to 20 below for a few nights] and it turns out he just drove out to the country, parked by the side of the road, rolled down his windows and turned off the motor. He deliberately froze to death. I heard that and felt sick, and since then [that was about 30 years ago] the world just seemed a little bit darker of a place.
It’s 13F right now in Raleigh. We had an outage yesterday afternoon for about 3 hours because of a local equipment issue but it’s good now. We are about 15 miles from a honkin’ big nuke plant and that makes me happy!
15-minute rolling blackouts in east Tennesse due to high demand. Not too bad, I understand why they have to do it, but we're close to a dam so we don't get hit too bad.
I'm sure there are a lot of people like me that had to turn their pool pumps on 24/7 to keep the pumps and pipes from freezing and breaking. During the 2021 storm I didn't do that and the new pump cost me right around $1000. It was 6 degrees when I woke up today in East TX. Judging by the weather reports I'll have to run my pool until about Tuesday or it will freeze solid and cost me a ton of money again.
The worst part for me is my HVAC is broken and not blowing heat so I have space heaters and a fire going all day, but it wasn't enough to keep my office kitchen sink and bathroom sink pipes from freezing. My office is in a converted garage (former owners made it into a mother-in-law suite) so the pipes to those areas run through the attic - unheated. The rest of the house was fine, and they thawed out this afternoon. At least we have power this time, although it did go down for exactly 1 second the other day - just enough that I had to reset all the embedded clocks and fix all my smart LEDs.
2021 sucked. I learned a lot from the freeze of 1989. I had drained all of the water out of my house pipes just to be safe. So, even after losing power for days, my house pipes were good. Lots of people had damage due to broken pipes.
Where I failed was my pool. It's supposed to run in "freeze mode", like mine is right now, when it gets cold. That's what they teach in "pool school". But what if the power goes out? (particularly at 2:30 in the morning when it is freezing and wet outside) What do you do? You turn off the breaker to the pool equipment. You then remove all of the plugs in the pumps, heater, and such and let the water run out. I didn't know this. (and don't think clearly when it's 2:30 in the morning and I'm trying to figure out just how to stay warm) I lost my heater, my UV, and had broken pipes. Five grand. Now I know what to do. They should teach this in "pool school".
We can't drain our pools where I am in Texas. If empty, the pool can literally float up out of the ground due to the hydrostatic pressure of the ground.
WAY expensive since I have an in-ground liner pool. If I drained the pool down far enough the liner would end up having to be replaced.
I'm fortunate with my electric plan though. I have free nights from 8pm to 6am. In the summer when my family uses the pool I run the pump for 8 hours during the free time, and during the winter when the pool cover is on I run it for 4 hours a night. Unfortunately I can't do that at the moment.
I will say eventually I'll win the battle with my wife - I hate the pool because all pools are money pits, and she likes it. She has been realizing the money wasted recently, but she still doesn't like my idea of draining it and making it into a tornado/SHTF bunker. Another year or 2 of sheltering in the bathrooms while tornadoes are in the area should do it.
Probably correct on both counts, Fren. The stupidity is off the charts.
The stupidity is having an all-electric home. Electricity is terrible to heat with.
My dad lived out in the country. There was no natural gas to be had. Propane, like having your own tank and taking delivery, wasn't cheap. So, he had a nice wood-burning fireplace that he ran all day.
At night they used that magical invention called a heating blanket.
We watched a video earlier today where a guy puts a wick in a can of crisco, puts that in a terra cotta saucer, puts 3 clay feet on the saucer rim, and then stacked progressively smaller terra cotta pots upside down until it came to a point at the top. It looked like a traffic cone. It got to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. If you had one of those, minus rambunctious kids and pets, you’d be set.
That’s the one!
The terra cotta pots don't add any heat to the room. The flame from the oil adds all the heat. The pots absorb the heat and radiate the heat into the room. Save money on pots and burn the candles by themselves. The same amount of heat will fill the room.
Electricity isn't stupid or terrible if you (a) live in a country where the govt isn't feverishly working to destroy everything about your way of life and (b) have a home over 2000 sq ft. You can't heat a decent-sized house with high ceilings using a wood stove. What are you going to do, get up every hour throughout the night to stoke the fire?
A magical wood-burning heating blanket, we assume? LOL we use an electric blanket instead.
I hated dealing with propane at my previous address. We love our spacious all-electric home, 1000 sq ft smaller yet still way too big for a wood stove to handle.
Is electricity for everyone? Clearly not. Does that mean it's stupid? Not for everyone, it isn't.
You must be smarter than anyone else. A rank of wood is 90-120 bucks if you dont own a forest electric heat Is cheaper than all.other forms of heating. I own 2 fully electric homes.
This is absolutely 100% wrong.
Electricity is fantastic, especially if you produce your own. Solar, wind turbines, petro generators all have their place. Electricity is very versatile. For heating, I use natural gas. I have electric heat upstairs, but I don't use it because it is terribly inefficient. I also have a wood burning stove insert in the fireplace in the living room. The key is to have multiple means. All these folks that are all in on any singular solution can end up in a jam. One is none and two is one is a common Marine Corps saying. I just take it a bit further and say, have as many solutions to any problem as you can manage.
Many trees are cut down in the summer. Just ask for some and people are more than happy to give it away for free. I have pulled my car over many times and loaded up at the most unexpected times. And it’s fun!
People beat their homes with electricity in Tx? Wtf
We have the best electricfags, believe me
Everybody says so
I wasn't aware dickqueef was even a word, lol.
Came here to say exactly that! Had to be some party hardy drunk hit a pole!
Always have a wood burning fireplace if you can😂
They are AMAZING. I have an insert in my living room surrounded by bricks. You can place a pot on top and keep water warm. It works so well even at the lowest flue opening, that I can open my back door in the middle of an ice storm and my interior will still be at least 70 degrees. When power goes out, you can even burn wood down to coals and use it as an oven. I made a pizza in mine once lol.
^ this is what we should all aspire to
They work so well compared to electric heat that sometimes my guests complain it's almost "too hot" when I have a fire going lol.
There is no comparison to the holistic nature of wood heat. The warmth surrounds you like a blanket. You can tell the difference between heat from a fireplace and electric heat from wall units.
That sounds ridiculous and even insane...
But I feel it too! It's awesome. And I like the smell.
Yep, I don't mind a little wood smoke aroma inside my house. It gets me vibin' like I'm in a cabin in the woods even when I live in the middle of suburbia lol.
Wood cracking and popping with flame light is what gets me. Screw t.v., a fireplace and ignoring the weather = peace.
There are only 2 things a man will watch, a woman or a fire.
Now that I've thought about it for many seconds, I wonder if it's because a hot wood stove blasts the room with more than just hot air... There's IR radiation coming off that thing too. That's why I point different sides of myself at it...
It would make sense as you get the same sensation as you do when you stand in front of a heat lamp, but more "spread out".
That was on my Christmas list one year: fireplace inserts for the two fireplaces.
I don't live there now, however.
Mine is roaring tonight in Florida. Stay warm frens.
Lol people die in Florida if it gets to 60°. It's 10 below in Ohio right now, and breezy. I'm supposed to be in Florida now but got a funeral, then I'm a vapor trail.
I luckily have one. Burning a nice fire right now. (along with both gas-fired furnaces)
I've found that the best way to be efficient with your interior burns is to only open the vent the absolute minimum to maintain your wood's burn, and also using a hybrid method of firelogs and actual wood. I like to use 1 Tacoma firelog and 2 regular splits. The firelog will maintain your fire base while you add 1 split at a time after getting your inital fire going.
https://tacomafirelogs.com/
Powerlineman here retired, nothing beats a wood burner after I've been out in it for 16 hrs with 8 to rest and do it again. Now I get to sit next to it without the work part 😆
Many of these stupid assholes are people who vote for green new deal conservationism, and yes Texas is not exempt from this stupidity. This is demonstrated over the last decade where thousands of domestic migrants (people from other states, namely blue states) move into Texas and then vote for the same shit that ruined the place they moved from.
Wow some of you are so mean.
Iwhere I am it's currently -18f with a low of -25f it's a killing cold, it's been like this all week and there are places in the state that will get even colder. We know how to deal with it, this is a normal part of winter for ND. But , Have some compassion I do whenever I hear about regions being colder than normal because they're not prepared.
There are nursing homes and hospitals and homeless that will suffer the worst of it. Not to mention wildlife and animals, as well as plants in southern regions.
Nature is an eternal bar-setter.
Remain above the bar, or suffer and die. It's that simple. Nature doesn't have sympathy, it can't be mean.
And the people here speak the truth, which like nature, is hard and unforgiving.
I'd say you'd better get used to it.
This is the time to be better than, and not like the liberals But you do you boo.
I'm going to keep being the same me I have been for 56 years I might not be able to change the world but I CAN change the world around me.
Lol I've worked customer service or retail for over 20 years now I work for the DoT if anyone has a right to be jaded with the public it's me. But I try to take each person as an individual instead of judging the whole.
I've always been that way.
just like it's exhausting to be in customer service, it's exhausting to be involved in the great awakening.
You're God's customer service agent. Lol.
Lol you would be surprised. I have spoke to and had customers not just from across the country but across the world.
I've done everything from customer service for a well known catalog company,to taking calls from vets for the WWII memorial. My work has been anything but boring, lol.
This is always a treacherous time of year for some when the cold comes, not to mention the stray animals out there. It is bitter here in east Tennessee, but I remember when I lived in Iowa and that bone-chilling, crippling cold would set in. I had to work in it, on telecommunications equipment. There were days when numbness was the norm, but you have to work to pay the bills.
The farmers are the true heroes. The work they do is phenomenal. However, that is not without tragedy. I had a good friend who was a farmer, good family man, owned a 400-acre corn farm. So, he's out working on the farm and goes home at sunset, and it was 5 degrees. His wife [she was kind of a standoffish bitch] told him she didn't love him anymore. He was crushed, all that he worked for was for naught, he felt broken. I called to see how he was doing and she told me "he went out." I figure he might have gone to a bar, but I didn't know which one. Still hadn't heard from him after a couple of days, then a story comes on the local news about how this guy was found sitting in his truck on a lonely road out in the country. He drove out there [lows were from 10 to 20 below for a few nights] and it turns out he just drove out to the country, parked by the side of the road, rolled down his windows and turned off the motor. He deliberately froze to death. I heard that and felt sick, and since then [that was about 30 years ago] the world just seemed a little bit darker of a place.
I know, its really cold out, so I will plug in my EV.
how's that working for ya' ?
It’s 13F right now in Raleigh. We had an outage yesterday afternoon for about 3 hours because of a local equipment issue but it’s good now. We are about 15 miles from a honkin’ big nuke plant and that makes me happy!
Should’ve voted for governor Thor!
If it's the governors fault then it's really bidens fault. You know, the president.
Texfag:
"Ever-thang is Bigger in Texas, shooot... even our liberal base.
But hey, we gave y'all George Uno & G Dubbya Dos so whatcha all whinin' 'bout?
I mean, fool us twice... shame on, shame on... meee?
Don't mess with Texas!"
Demand is more than expected, but thus far no major problems.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
15-minute rolling blackouts in east Tennesse due to high demand. Not too bad, I understand why they have to do it, but we're close to a dam so we don't get hit too bad.
I'm sure there are a lot of people like me that had to turn their pool pumps on 24/7 to keep the pumps and pipes from freezing and breaking. During the 2021 storm I didn't do that and the new pump cost me right around $1000. It was 6 degrees when I woke up today in East TX. Judging by the weather reports I'll have to run my pool until about Tuesday or it will freeze solid and cost me a ton of money again.
The worst part for me is my HVAC is broken and not blowing heat so I have space heaters and a fire going all day, but it wasn't enough to keep my office kitchen sink and bathroom sink pipes from freezing. My office is in a converted garage (former owners made it into a mother-in-law suite) so the pipes to those areas run through the attic - unheated. The rest of the house was fine, and they thawed out this afternoon. At least we have power this time, although it did go down for exactly 1 second the other day - just enough that I had to reset all the embedded clocks and fix all my smart LEDs.
2021 sucked. I learned a lot from the freeze of 1989. I had drained all of the water out of my house pipes just to be safe. So, even after losing power for days, my house pipes were good. Lots of people had damage due to broken pipes.
Where I failed was my pool. It's supposed to run in "freeze mode", like mine is right now, when it gets cold. That's what they teach in "pool school". But what if the power goes out? (particularly at 2:30 in the morning when it is freezing and wet outside) What do you do? You turn off the breaker to the pool equipment. You then remove all of the plugs in the pumps, heater, and such and let the water run out. I didn't know this. (and don't think clearly when it's 2:30 in the morning and I'm trying to figure out just how to stay warm) I lost my heater, my UV, and had broken pipes. Five grand. Now I know what to do. They should teach this in "pool school".
How expensive would it be to avoid all of the freezing hassles and just drain your pool every year?
We can't drain our pools where I am in Texas. If empty, the pool can literally float up out of the ground due to the hydrostatic pressure of the ground.
https://teampoolworks.com/blog/hydrostatic-pressure-inground-pool/
WAY expensive since I have an in-ground liner pool. If I drained the pool down far enough the liner would end up having to be replaced.
I'm fortunate with my electric plan though. I have free nights from 8pm to 6am. In the summer when my family uses the pool I run the pump for 8 hours during the free time, and during the winter when the pool cover is on I run it for 4 hours a night. Unfortunately I can't do that at the moment.
I will say eventually I'll win the battle with my wife - I hate the pool because all pools are money pits, and she likes it. She has been realizing the money wasted recently, but she still doesn't like my idea of draining it and making it into a tornado/SHTF bunker. Another year or 2 of sheltering in the bathrooms while tornadoes are in the area should do it.
Wait 'til there are thousands (min) of mandated EVs trying to charge off the same grid.