fitzw | Deep Freeze: Day 1 (Friday) -- Part I

I awoke shortly after 4:00 AM on Friday morning. I don't know what it was that woke me, but I went from deep sleep for full wakefulness. Turning over to look at the clock display, I couldn't see it. I knew immediately that this meant that the power was out, at least on our floor (2nd floor of the farmhouse).

I rose and turned on the electric lantern (rechargable with a dynamo in the base) from its shelf next to the bed, dressed quickly and went out of the bedroom. The stove in the kitchen was low, so I stirred it up and added more wood. Then I went downstairs.

Downstairs, I checked to determine that the power was out there as well, which would mean that the whole house was out. A quick glance out the window at the barn showed that the lights for the chickens were not on (they should have been on for half an hour by that point), which meant that the barn power was out as well.

I checked on my father, found that he was asleep, and decided to start the emergency procedures myself. It's not like I haven't been through a power outage on the farm before.

I checked the one downstairs phone that was not a portable (both floors have one) and found a dial tone, so I called the power company to report the outage. Working my way through the automated voice menu, I was told that service for customers in our area was anticipated to be restored by 11:59 PM, December 14. Sunday. This was Friday, and the temperature outdoors were around freezing, and it was still raining. I cleared off and then started a fire in the cook stove in the downstairs kitchen, to help keep the downstairs warm. That stove is usually only lit on particularly cold days to supplement the radiators.

Without power, the pressure for water from the main well couldn't be maintained, but it would last for a little while. We also have a separate, spring-fed water line for the house for this sort of thing. It's connected to one faucet in the back kitchen, and the cold faucet and toilet in the downstairs bathroom off of the kitchen can both be switched to spring water. I left that step for my father to do when he woke up.

There's also an inverted-J pipe in the back attic (over the back kitchen, outside a door from the upstairs kitchen) that constantly pours water into a funnel in the top of a drain pipe, to keep the water from the spring flowing so that it doesn't freeze in cold weather (the spring feed actually runs above ground at one point where it crosses a brook). So water wouldn't be a problem. Hot water would be an issue, and pressurized water would also be an issue when the pressure ran out. More on that below.

I made a quick check of the basement for the sake of completeness, and noted the temperature on the water jacket for the boiler was in its usual range for regular operation, but that wouldn't be much of a help in this case.

The main heat source in the house is a wood-fired gasification boiler (with an oil-fired backup) that runs a parallel hot water radiator system. There are two zones fed by independent loops, one for each residential floor of the house. The problem is that the loops are fed by electric circulator pumps, and with the power out, those pumps would not run. I knew this, which is why I made sure that both stoves had fires.

During this period,

helwen had lit a couple of the oil lamps that she had gotten in the past couple of years (three recently, with wall-mount brackets and reflectors) for ambient light on the second floor.

I'd made the phone call, I'd lit the fires, and there wasn't much more to do at this point, so we doused the lights and went back to bed for a little while.

It was now 6:00 AM.

EDIT: Corrected the temperature from that morning -- It wasn't until Friday night that the temperatures dropped into the teens.