Ghastly and miserable!

[robcat2075]

Ghastly and miserable, the previous three days in Texas were.

Winters here are usually "mild" with maybe one day with snow and several nights where it gets below freezing. And it's been trending warmer over the last few decades.

But last weekend the coldest weather  in all the time I've been here arrived and somehow caused a collapse of the whole electricity-generating system.

They warned us in advance to expect rolling blackouts of 15 minutes to an hour. I was ready for that but at my house the power went out and stayed out for more than two days.

Electric heat is all I've got so this is what it came to... warming my feet by candles.

That was successful enough that i decided to go big and put out trays with 45 candles at once which got my room from 25° to 50°.



Good enough to stop constantly shivering. The rest of the house was an ice box, however.
 

[johnl3d]

The Texas cold is on the tv again tonight,,,   a lot harder to handle then the cold and snow in Wisconsin since the power is on here as well as the gas heat for the furnace.

[Wildsided]

Stay safe Robert, we had a couple of days without power when I lived in Bracebridge Ontario and you don't realise how dark and cold it gets until there's no power. Hope they get it sorted soon. 

[robcat2075]

The power is back today and they say the blackouts are over.

But I still feel like I should be wearing five layers of clothing.

[Fuchur]

That really sounds awful. Hope you are doing well and did not catch a bad cold or something.

Best regards and I hope you are really back to normal now.
*Fuchur*

[robcat2075]

Thanks!

The crisis is over for me now. I'm sure this was a worse nightmare for everyone who wasn't able-bodied or had kids and no back-up place to go to.

For a lot of people this will be a continuing disaster as their frozen pipes thaw out and start leaking but my house is in such a state of unrepair it's easy to get to the leaky pipes. Fortunately i had enough spare parts around that i could saw a pipe off and cap it when a leak happened.

It's not clear why this collapse  happened. Some windmills in west Texas froze up, that would have been avoidable by buying better windmills, but a more immediately avoidable problem was that someone allowed a bunch of gas-fired generating plants to shut down for maintenance even when they knew this super cold weather was coming.

I'm sure our Texas legislature will conduct a thorough fact-finding investigation, identify the corporate culprits, then put out a press release blaming Antifa.

This debacle makes me all the more eager to build my tiny house and get out of the 100-year-old relic I'm in.