Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
What IS this? And the other ones.
We get some cold winters over here, but 1) my room is still warm, and 2) why is there so much water in the room??
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@topspin said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
We get some cold winters over here, but 1) my room is still warm, and 2) why is there so much water in the room??
Pipes have been freezing and bursting so that when it warms up a bit they end up causing this sort of flooding. Due to not having power they cannot keep the interiors warm, which would have kept the pipes from freezing.
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@boomzilla Here we had a big massive dump yesterday and today, a shit ton of snow but no freezing rain, power outages or the rest of what's happening in TX.
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@topspin said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
cue the Canadians laughing at that
Not sure if laughing matter but
Of the 15 communities with new record lows on Monday, the coldest was in Red Deer, which saw temperatures drop to -43.9 C — breaking the city’s previous record of -40.6 C, set back in 1936.
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@hungrier said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
or the rest of what's happening in TX.
Toby Fair: Texas is just not prepared to deal with this kind of weather
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@hungrier said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla Here we had a big massive dump yesterday and today, a shit ton of snow but no freezing rain, power outages or the rest of what's happening in TX.
Yeah, the power thing is Texas specific. The bottom line is that they weren't prepared for this kind of weather (because it generally doesn't happen to them at this scale). I posted this elsewhere, but I'll repost here:
Much misinformation out there about #Texaspoweroutage,
@ERCOT_ISO
, wind and solar power, and thermal generators (gas and coal). Let's review what we think we know right now.
@TPPF @Life_Powered_ 1/10Two problems in #Texas, one short term and exacerbated by the long term issue, and one long term. 2/10
The short term failure came at about 1 AM Monday when #ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures and arranged for more generation. 3/10
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation. 4/10
This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants. 5/10
In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar... 6/10
...which is cheap for two reasons – it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can. 7/10
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity (they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity). This subsidized (state and federal) wind and solar have pushed... 8/10
...reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market. This reduced the capacity margin – grids must have excess capacity to ensure stability. 9/10
Texas is experiencing what California has – with California affecting the entire Western Interconnection due to its policies. Blackouts are a feature of the push to have more unreliable renewables on the grid. Must pay $$ for reliable backup w/ renewables 10/10
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"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"
Except in TX, where mail hasn't been delivered since last week.
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@TimeBandit said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@hungrier said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
or the rest of what's happening in TX.
Toby Fair: Texas is just not prepared to deal with this kind of weather
We don't even have snowplows, because we almost never (once in 32 years?) need them.
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@topspin said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
We get some cold winters over here, but 1) my room is still warm, and 2) why is there so much water in the room??
Pipes have been freezing and bursting so that when it warms up a bit they end up causing this sort of flooding. Due to not having power they cannot keep the interiors warm, which would have kept the pipes from freezing.
The workaround to that is to drain the pipes when they're at risk of freezing. But that requires knowing about the risk and the workaround in advance.
Here (where freezing temperatures are not uncommon) that solution is commonly applied to outside taps, with a separate shut-off valve in the interior (heated) part of the pipe.
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@HardwareGeek said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
We don't even have snowplows
And buildings are not built for freezing temps either
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@PleegWat said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@topspin said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
We get some cold winters over here, but 1) my room is still warm, and 2) why is there so much water in the room??
Pipes have been freezing and bursting so that when it warms up a bit they end up causing this sort of flooding. Due to not having power they cannot keep the interiors warm, which would have kept the pipes from freezing.
The workaround to that is to drain the pipes when they're at risk of freezing. But that requires knowing about the risk and the workaround in advance.
Here (where freezing temperatures are not uncommon) that solution is commonly applied to outside taps, with a separate shut-off valve in the interior (heated) part of the pipe.
Yes, we always drain our outside lines and shut them off in late Autumn. I had an internal pipe freeze once a few years ago when it was getting really cold. It was the line to my kitchen sink, which froze overnight. The pipe ran for a bit along an exterior wall. Fortunately, pulling out the dishwasher was enough to let some warmer air into that area and the pipe hadn't burst.
We also had one of the exterior lines burst because apparently not enough water had drained out of the lines. Which required replacing the ceiling in our living room, which sucked except that we added recessed lighting and a ceiling fan which were big upgrades so it kind of worked out in the end.
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Yeah, but if you have always been around warm temps you probably don't immediately think to shutoff the water and drain all the lines in the house. You see it every winter in the mountains where someone with a winter cabin doesn't shutoff the water when they leave and come ski season they find their cabin is a solid block of ice.
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@Dragoon Whenever I've been to a rental cabin, that sort of thing is part of the check-out checklist. But houses here aren't built with a shutoff to the external faucets, and you can't really shut off water to the whole house if you're living in it. Maybe if you know you're going to have an extended power outage and can't keep the pipes from freezing, but the advance warning we were given said that rolling blackouts would be 20-40 minutes in length, so nobody expected these extended outages.
I've been lucky; my neighborhood lost power for a few hours during the initial ice storm last week, but nothing since then. Maybe that blackout put us at the bottom of the list for the planned outages, since we already had ours.
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Yeah, but as night approaches and you still have no power, you shutoff the water at the main if at all possible. This is just common sense, or at least it is for someone who grew up in an area that sees cold weather.
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@HardwareGeek My dad would turn off the water to the external faucets not for frost, but to counter neighbour kids turning the tap on.
That and we had a underground rainwater cellar which was all that really got used for things like watering plants and filling kiddie pools.
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@boomzilla In real life, half of Texas's oil and gas heads are frozen and unable to work. So unless you think the market is going to keep trillion gallon strategic reserves in place for the 100 year eventuality that Texas might freeze over, it seems somewhat pointless to blame renewables. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
Looks like there's gonna be a lot of blown pipes, and expensive renovation when the cold fucks off.
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@Captain said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla In real life, half of Texas's oil and gas heads are frozen and unable to work. So unless you think the market is going to keep trillion gallon strategic reserves in place for the 100 year eventuality that Texas might freeze over, it seems somewhat pointless to blame renewables. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/
Yeah, but the renewables have also been distorting their market and grid in bad ways. And if you read what I posted you'll see all that about the gas.
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@Captain Considering that a lot of the currently existing pumping infrastructure relies on the electric grid (instead of using the gas in the pipes to power the pumps, which is an option too), keeping a couple days supply at hand seems prudent.
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:trolleysnowplow:
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
And if you read what I posted you'll see all that about the gas.
The core problem seems to be that almost all the generating capacity is adversely affected in one way or another because it's simply not configured for dealing with that much cold. Coal's frozen in its bunkers. Oil won't flow (no heaters). Not quite sure what's up with gas. Wind generators' bearings are seized. Nuclear's cooling ponds are iced up. And there's no interconnects so no real way to get anything from elsewhere. (Apparently, according to what I read, if there'd been interconnects, then federal regulations would have applied and made the infrastructure less susceptible to the cold event, but I'm not sure about that.)
This shitstorm is made out of ice and state politics.
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@dkf said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
Not quite sure what's up with gas.
From what I've heard, they pretty much pump it out of the ground on demand. And the pumps are frozen at the well heads.
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@Carnage said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
Looks like there's gonna be a lot of blown pipes, and expensive renovation when the cold fucks off.
Fuck. This.
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@error said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@Carnage said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
Looks like there's gonna be a lot of blown pipes, and expensive renovation when the cold fucks off.
Fuck. This.
Living in Sweden, shit tends to be built for the cold so we don't get that widespread coldpocalyptic stuff here. But we do get some pretty cold days that makes water go solid in pipes anyway.
During the 7 years I lived in a house, we had a few of them happen, and seems like this could be a decent place to tell the stories.The house was an old farm house, the walls were solid logs with a thin layer of planks on top and the house was heated with fireplaces and electricity. The house was built in a time when water was something you got out of a well with a bucket, so the piping was exposed to the cold in a few places. The well was about 100 meters away from the house, and the pump was in it's own pump room in a barn.
The sewage was pretty much dumped in a ditch 150 or so meters away from the house.First one happened the first year me and my ex lived there. The temperatures crept below -25 °C, and the water froze in the pipe to the kitchen. This pipe was run up in a side attic (or whatever the fuck anglophones call this: My ex filled it up with all the useless shit she hadn't unpacked. So I had to pull all of that shit out. Cubic meters of useless shit in boxes.
These are cold and basically just an air barrier, so pretty chilly during winter. Some previous owner had apparently had freezing problems with the pipe before and simply just built a box around it and filled the box with mineral wool. I pulled it all apart and bought some pipe heater and wrapped the pipes in the heater and put everything back together. Pipes were made of plastic so they didn't explode. But man, I'd like to give the person that did the piping a good slap in the face because damn, that was a fugly job. Annoying but not too bad.The second thing that happened the same winter was that we started to have problems flushing the toilets, it took forever to flush. And the kitchen sink started having the same problem with low flow. Now, we figured this was because the pipes being clogged, so we got a guy to come out to was and empty our sewage. He discovered that nope, no tank or well for sewage, it just went somewhere unknown. He tested pumping steaming hot water down the pipe to see where it came out. And that's how we found out that we were pumping sewage into a ditch. Highly illegal. Oh, and yeah, this was winter, the ground was not entirely frozen, but not exactly easy to dig. But the exit pipe had been overgrown and was below ground, which caused the sewage to back up. I went out with a shovel to dig the pipe out. And found it half a meter down in what can only be described as sewage mulch. Mmmmmh... I burned the clothes afterward.
The third time I came home from work, late one day, long after dark, and met my ex in the door telling me that there was no water pressure. Oh great! Since the temperature was well below -35 °C something had frozen. And since everything in the house was without water, I went to the pump room. I could hear the pump going full speed. And also the sound of very much water being pumped into the room. The door to this room was a heavy steel door, and the walls were concrete. There had been a lot of snow so I couldn't see the bottom of the door, but when I kicked it away, there was a frozen waterfall beneath the door. Wooh.
So I tried unlocking the door. Well... The lock had frozen solid. So I went and got myself a blowtorch so I could remedy that. And once that was done, the door was frozen solid in it's frame. Fuck yeah! The perfect way to wind down from an extra annoying and long day at work. So I went and got myself a rubber sledgehammer and started the percussive maintenance on the lower end of the door and it's frame. With a low amount of force I got the door open, and was met with a room that was about 2 dm of water, with an ice wall towards the door. This room had a small electric heater that by the looks of it was from the 60ies, to keep it from freezing in winter. The heater was submerged. But it hadn't shorted out, because the pump leaked a generous amount of oil, and had drenched the heater in oil over the decades so I guess it was completely hydrophobic.
Well, I smashed the ice wall so most of the water could escape. I then got inside the room and turned the pump off, to downgrade the problem from Oh fucking hell to just Oh fuck. Then I got a big broom and got rid of the remaining water before it'd freeze on the floor (and to get a lower chance of being electrocuted while fixing the pipe).
The door wouldn't close because a lot of ice had now accumulated on the threshold so I got to work in -35 with wet clothes and cold copper pipes.
Because what had happened was that a pipe that went into the barn had frozen and the ice had blown apart a junction. It took a bit of work to get it all together again, because my hands kept freezing to the pipes and tools.
All done,. I had to get some fucking not frozen water to prime the pump that by some fucking miracle wasn't frozen solid (or perhaps copious amount of leaked oil). Got everything running again, and made sure the pipe running into the barn was closed off.
I then had to make the door close, so... Sledgehammer and plenty of flailing and a while later the door would close.
I think it was 01:00 by the time I was finished. I hadn't eaten since lunch, I was cold, dirty and generally fucking pissed off. And I had to get up at 05:00 to get to work again.The last time happened the last winter we lived there. Also during a cold snap. And the water froze in the piping underground. We'd gotten a new well, drilled one, because the previously described well was not clean, and the pump was not ours and it was on a different property so we got a new well.
And... Of fucking course the pipe heater broke this winder so the water froze in the half a meter gap of pipes underneath the flooring to the ground.
Went and called a plumber that came and flushed the pipes with hot water and swapped the pipe heater for us.No pipes actually ever broke, the one in the pump room just separated in a junction basically meant to do that when it got frozen. Would have been nice of the builders to add somewhere for the water to go though.
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And it's snowing again in Texas. Yay.
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@HardwareGeek said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
And it's snowing again in Texas. Yay.
What's the power situation like now? I'm currently in Georgia and was planning to come back Sunday.
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
There’s a really dark cloud inside that silver lining
Filed under: All that freezes must thaw
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@antiquarian said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@HardwareGeek said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
And it's snowing again in Texas. Yay.
What's the power situation like now? I'm currently in Georgia and was planning to come back Sunday.
Got an email less than an hour ago that ERCOT has canceled the rolling blackout, at least for now. Some areas still have weather-related interruptions, but the weather has improved enough that crews are able to get out and get things fixed. The snow we had earlier was just a brief flurry that didn't last long. But Walmart is still canceling delivery orders; they canceled my grocery order that was supposed to be delivered tomorrow morning, and the earliest available delivery for a reorder is Monday evening.
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@HardwareGeek said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
they canceled my grocery order that was supposed to be delivered tomorrow morning, and the earliest available delivery for a reorder is Monday evening.
It's time to sharpen your hunting skillset
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@topspin said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
What IS this? And the other ones.
We get some cold winters over here, but 1) my room is still warm, and 2) why is there so much water in the room??Fake news, deep state, never happened.
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Weather alert: Snow tonight, freezing rain in the morning
Tabarnak
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@boomzilla Why are Canadians so stupid to import their cars from Texas?
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@BernieTheBernie huh?
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@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla Why are Canadians so stupid to import their cars from Texas?
Elon promised them they’d be saving the world and keeping their snow.
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie huh?
Because we learned that wind mills are capable of delivering electricity in Antarctica, but fail at first snow in Texas.
In Texas, nothing gets built for real winter
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@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
In Texas,
We're expecting a crisp 79°F today.
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@error At 50°N 8°E 230m asl, the lawn is covered with about 1 cm of snow, still increasing...
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@error said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
In Texas,
We're expecting a crisp 79°F today.
Hah, 82°F (28°C) here (currently 71 (22)). , DFW.
Coincidentally, I looked out the kitchen window this morning and thought I saw snow on the rear window and trunk lid of the neighbors' car, which was odd, considering how warm it was yesterday. It turned out the reflection of the overcast sky silhouetting a tree looked kind of like an incomplete layer of snow, but it had me wondering for a minute.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie huh?
Because we learned that wind mills are capable of delivering electricity in Antarctica, but fail at first snow in Texas.
In Texas, nothing gets built for real winterI don't know what anything here has to do with Canadians cars coming from Texas but OK.
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@error I'm in this picture and now I feel like crying.
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@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie huh?
Because we learned that wind mills are capable of delivering electricity in Antarctica, but fail at first snow in Texas.
In Texas, nothing gets built for real winterI don't know what anything here has to do with Canadians cars coming from Texas but OK.
Funny thing, he wasn't that far off. My car was manufactured in Alabama.
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@hungrier said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@boomzilla said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@BernieTheBernie huh?
Because we learned that wind mills are capable of delivering electricity in Antarctica, but fail at first snow in Texas.
In Texas, nothing gets built for real winterI don't know what anything here has to do with Canadians cars coming from Texas but OK.
Funny thing, he wasn't that far off. My car was manufactured in Alabama.
Yeah, but you're Canadian. Not an American who drove up there and can't get back because his engine block froze.
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@boomzilla thank zod, I was beginning to worry. But it is in fact snowing, phew.
...
Wait, how long has it been snowing?
And what's with this human-interest BS in a snow story?
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@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
@error At 50°N 8°E 230m asl, the lawn is covered with about 1 cm of snow, still increasing...
Try using a smaller value for north latitude.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Important announcement: It's snowing in Canada:
In Texas, nothing gets built for real
FTFY. If it's stationary plant it was built by grifters, for grifters, for purposes of a grift - they don't just play at grifting like Florida, it's the law.
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