Working as Designed - it's just COLD OUT

[dreamshark]

Had a moment of panic this morning when I noticed that it was only 60 degrees in the living room and the furnace wasn't running. But after a little experimentation and reflection, I think it's working as designed, just not keeping up. The radiators are all smokin' hot, even the one in Amber's room (Christmas miracle! For the first time in 28 years, it started heating up all the way to the top!). When the radiators start to cool down a little, the heat comes on for a while, then goes off again. I think it must have a cutoff of some kind to stop running when the water reaches some maximum temp, regardless of what the thermostat says. It's not supposed to be steam heat, after all. Unfortunately, this is a cavernous house with lots of heat leaks and one little radiator in each room just isn't keeping up with the heat suck.

It's actually perfectly comfortable upstairs, heat rising and all that. Oh, brain attack! How's about I close the door to the attic (which is heated entirely by heat rising from the lower floors). *duh* And maybe now would be a good time to turn on the oven and try out that beer bread mix my sister-in-law gave us for Christmas!

For the record, it was -22 this morning and breezy. Pretty cold for post-climate-change Minnesota, but I note that it is neither as cold nor as windy as the weather services predicted. I still think it's kind of an over-reaction to close down the city for this (especially since this is pretty much what winter was always like back in the '70's when I moved here). But my management went with the flow and sent everybody email telling us to "work from home," so that's what I'm doing. 

Comments

[quadong.livejournal.com]

"Work from home" is code for "check your e-mail a couple of times", right?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed that's what all my colleagues were doing when they were WFH. I finally got my computer set up for VPN and tried it myself during the post-Thanksgiving snows, and was surprised to discover how easy it is to work MORE than 8 hours from home once you get on a roll. But I had something I was right in the middle of at that time. Things are pretty slow right now, so I'm basically checking email.

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I had never thought about the fact that with radiators there needed to be two separate conditions that turned the furnace off. I'm going to try to remember that and not panic later, myself.

In our apartment, I almost always keep the radiator in our bedroom cranked all the way off. (The building has a central thermostat and we can only adjust our unit's temperature by adjusting individual radiators.) Otherwise, we get roasted alive. These last few days I have taken the exceptional step of allowing it to provide heat during the day, but still turning it off at night. We have fairly good modern windows, and I'm guessing the furnace was speced for a building with 1930's windows.

[pameladean]

It wasn't as practical to work from home in the 1970's. I don't see much point in cold-weather heroics, myself, if one is not a firefighter or an EMT. And providing the latter with fewer opportunities in this weather is fine with me too.

P.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I think I would have been warmer at work. But who wants to be the only sucker that spends the time to drive in?

[pameladean]

Well, not me either, certainly.

It's the commute that might be a problem. Most people will make it where they're going just fine, but problems that would be relatively small in more benign weather become much bigger when the outside is actively trying to kill you.

I read your description of the furnace's behavior with a lot of interest, since we have hot-water heat too. But we have a smaller house and two furnaces, so so far things still seem normal on the heating front. Until the bills come, anyway.

P.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence that temperatures used to be like this a lot in the winter. That winters have become overall milder, yes, the records show that. But I can't find anything that says we used to have highs below zero, to say nothing of highs in the minus teens, "a lot" or "always" or "all the time" (various things people have said/written) in the past.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Not owning a weather station, all my evidence is, of course anecdotal. But I am quite sure that when I arrived in Minneapolis in December of 1972 (driving a VW microbus with a weak heater) the temp was about 20 below. I planned to visit friends for a few days and head on to California when it warmed up.I'm still here, so I guess it never did. Anyway, that's how I remember it.

In the late '70's I had a car that would start down to -5 degrees but not below. This would not be much of a problem in recent times, but if I hadn't found someone to car pool with during my first few years at Univac, I would have lost my job. I remember that car sitting in one place for days at a time, waiting for the temp to rise above zero. In fact, I was driven to the hospital to give birth to my first child on Jan 2, 1980, and the car ended up sitting on the street near the hospital for several days because the temp had plunged and it couldn't be started.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

It's surprisingly hard to find a simple graphical representation of weather patterns from year to year. I did find this list of the top 20 below-freezing streaks in Minneapolis history. It clearly confirms my memory that 1976-1981 were particularly brutal winters (in terms of cold). 1966-1969 were also very cold. Apparently the '40's and '50's were not memorably frigid, but I wasn't living here then.

this page has a temperature graph for 1972, the year I arrived. The real cold snap occurred in January, before I got here (average low temp -3, coldest night -28). But see that cluster of days in December starting with -19F on Dec 7? That must have been the day I arrived. You can see why it made an impression on me. I do NOT remember anybody being especially surprised or terrified by the cold snap - just kind of a collective shrug and a "Yeah, it gets pretty cold here in the winter." Then they started bragging about how it "sometimes" gets to -35.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It also seems hard (impossible?) to find historical data on school closings.

I think the daily highs are important, too, not just the lows. The top ten list of extended periods at zero or below from 1873 to 2014 includes 1994, 1970, 1963, 1936, 1911, 1904, and earlier--so you and I (arrived Jan. 1971) have been in Minnesota for only one of those. Only 27 times in 141 years have we had four consecutive days of below-zero highs; we aren't going to have them this week, as it is supposed to get to +2 today, but back below zero for a high tomorrow, so that's three days out of four consecutive, and awfully close today.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Multiple days of CONSECUTIVE below-zero highs is very unusual. However, during the years I mentioned it was not at all unusual to have 3-5 day stretches that were entirely below zero except for one day in the middle where the temp bounced up into the single digits. That's exactly what's happening right now, and everybody seems surprised (and terrified!). This pattern was not at all surprising during most of the 1970's.

I agree that yesterday was a mighty frigid day by any standard. You don't often see a HIGH in the negative double digits! Today, however, is just another cold day in Minnesota with a high in the single digits (it's already 2 above, and we've got a couple more hours until the temperature peaks).

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I don't see that on the charts--I see mainly days with highs above zero. The average January low is 7 and high is 24. The WeatherSpark site says, "The month of January is characterized by ... daily highs ... dropping below 8°F only one day in ten."

I think people tend to remember "the old days" according to their own personal experience rather than on an objective factual basis. Wunderground.com says the Minneapolis temperature on January 2, 1980 was low +15 and high +26. It didn't go below zero until January 7 (low of -2), on the 8th it didn't get above zero, on the 9th it was slightly above zero, and on the 10th it was +43. So there was only that single day when it didn't get above zero. There were 8 more days in the month with a low below zero, but no days with a high below zero.