Eight days into winter

It was a very strange Christmas at our house this year. The electricity blinked off at 7 or 8 pm on the 23rd. We were having an ice event. Over the next 24 hours more than a half an inch of ice built up on everything outside...encasing everything in ice. I used a rubber sledge hammer to break it off the Audi the next morning. This afternoon, three days later, we saw electrical repair trucks on the West Rd. and the crew said we would have power restored in an hour.

Fortunately, our house has some built in advantages to surviving without electricity in winter. I charged up the heated slab with extra heat prior to the storm and this heat stayed with us for quite awhile. We have a Finnish fireplace that can crank out a lot of heat if stoked for two or three days. Plus we had a lot of solar gain as the two days following the storm were bright and sunny. The fireplace has an oven and Gina cooked potatoes and squash in it for Christmas dinner. I grilled t-bone and porterhouse steaks (Don's grass fed beef) in the weber grill on the porch...the morning of the 24th it was 4 degrees F when we got up and temperatures during the 3 day outage ranged from 4 to 21 degrees...all in all a memorable year.

We are close to having another resource during outages....the Volt can be used as an emergency generator to power 120 volt loads like our oil-fired heating system, lights and chargers for electronic equipment, freezers ( we have a quarter of a steer in ours plus fruits, veggies, etc.),  I was thinking about buying the inverter kit prior to the storm...I guess I'll get it now. The only problem remaining would be water supply...our well pump is 240 volts and won't run off the Volt. Next outage we'll have electricity and heat and fill the bathtub with water to flush the toilets.

The Volt will be so much quieter than the generators we listened to through the woods. Our house is the last one on the circuit so our neighbors Kathie & Kim and Cal and Glen are on a different circuit and had electricity the whole time!! But down in the hollow and beyond the generators ran around the clock for three days!

It's the morning of the 29th now and the forecast calls for 5 to 9 inches of wet snow tonight!! The trees and everything else are still encased with ice and weighted down by snow we got two days ago. We are dumping extra heat into the slab just in case....