fitzw | Deep Freeze: Day 3 (Sunday)

Sunday was a lot like Saturday. More firewood hauled, more buckets of water. Eggs were gathered (fewer than usual), boiling water was used to melt the ice in the water feeder.

Sunday was the first day since the storm that air temperature rose above freezing, although some of the ice had managed to evaporate from direct sunlight on the day before.

We received reports that some of the businesses in the center of town had had their power restored, and we were looking forward to when we could get power back. We were already making plans on changes to storm preparations that would be needed for the next time that such a storm occurred, such as getting a backup generator that would power the circulators on the heating system.

We tried running the heating system according to the "lack of power" instructions, but we never got it to work quite right. The radiators on the first floor had had to have the air bled out of them on Saturday when the boiler finally cooled off, due to the water going over to steam and the pressure release valve dumping a lot of water onto the basement floor, while water was fed to the boiler using a garden hose from the spring faucet in the back kitchen (all of the faucets in that kitchen have hose fittings). We knew that there was sufficient "head" on the spring water because of the pipe in the back attic on the second floor to fill at least the first floor radiators -- the loop for the second floor was still closed.

But we couldn't get the water to circulate by convection unless we got the temperature in the water jacket well above the recommended temperature, and it didn't take much wood to do that. We loaned our Stirling-cycle fan to my parents so that they could blow the heat from the kitchen stove into the rest of their living space.

We removed food from the refrigerator (we had removed the food in the freezer to coolers that we had placed outdoors on Saturday night -- there are some advantages to losing power in wintertime) and moved it to the back attic, which I had managed to get back down to its usual 40°F by the expedient of opening the window.

We shared lunch with my parents, using food that was in danger of thawing from both of our stocks. Chicken, sweet potato, spinach, apple pie. All very good, made moreso by good company and shared hardship.

My father had been invited to a neighbor's party that had been scheduled for that afternoon (and was still to be held, using a generator for power), and left at 1:00 PM. I began work on replacing an electric outlet in the northwest room of our apartment, having been looking for an opportunity to do so after noticing that the old outlet had cracks running through it. Just in case, I turned off the circuit breakers for the apartment. Sure enough, the power came back on while I was in the middle of the process (about 1:30 PM), so we had to wait to turn our power back on until after I was done.

The emergency procedures went into reverse: The heating system had to be reconfigured to run on power; lights that had been accidentally turned on out of habit had to be found and turned off; faucets had to be opened to bleed the air out of the water pipes when the pressure came back up (when you open a faucet with no power, if you hear a hissing noise, that usually means that the faucet is sucking in air); plumbing in the main bathroom needed to be reconfigured; radiators on the second floor needed to have the air bled out of them; the timer for the lights for the chickens needed to be reset; clocks that didn't have batteries needed to be set; food needed to be returned to refrigerator and freezer once those had returned to their operating temperatures.

Water still needed to be carried to the chickens, as the valve was still frozen. That will take a couple of days to thaw out.

My father didn't get home from the party until he was brought home by my brother R's family at about 6:30 PM -- he missed that part of the fun.

We would normally have had choir practice on Sunday evening, but we had canceled it as of Saturday because of the power failure and road closures. Even though we had power by Sunday afternoon, we still needed time to recover.

The hardest part of having the power restored has been to relearn habits. We hadn't had electric lights for over two days, and the habit of turning them off has been hard to reëstablish. I find that, after dark or in early morning, I don't turn a light on when I enter a dark room, using my pocket flashlight instead.

It's been a very interesting weekend.