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2023-2024 Winter Weather

Trey3216

By Trey3216
in Daily Texan

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89626

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I use Wunderground because it is supposedly the most accurate at around 80%.  Why is weather prediction just so bad?  I feel like it's gotten worse over the past decade or so.  Not sure if that's just my frustration or if it's real.

Praising John Goodman GIF by The Righteous Gemstones
 

11 minutes ago, texasdago said:

We're hosed tomorrow morning.  

Kthxbye

At least there will be sunlight tomorrow, well in Austin.  That will help tremendously. 

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BillyGoatHill
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I went with the pouch/mitten covers this time around as those have come off in the past for me. These pouches have been more secure but maybe not as good as those plastic covers. I had to go out this

texasdago
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texasdago

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5 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Praising John Goodman GIF by The Righteous Gemstones
 

At least there will be sunlight tomorrow, well in Austin.  That will help tremendously. 

image.thumb.png.9e65547accf79fc17cb9b4daf4640010.png

I've got an assload of plants in our garage... right now alternative between a space heater to keep it "reasonable" in there and an LED sun lamp set up.  Seems to be working well.  Helps that it is an attached garage.  The lamp is basically this... 

 

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hookemATL

hookemATL 11701

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46 minutes ago, dogbreath said:

Cormorant this morning at the river. image.thumb.jpeg.713225a8e73a81fbb65cbcd3a49d9917.jpeg

“The one day I could get some alone time on the river, and this honky ass Scuba Steve motherfucker comes by for a polar swim and photos? FUCK. ME.”

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Judge Roybeanbag

Judge Roybeanbag 11819

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13 minutes ago, Hawndoh said:

My kitchen sink is on an outside wall. The cold water line to it is now frozen. The hot side still drips.

Everything else in my house seems fine, just that outside wall.

If you have a hair dryer you might be able to thaw it.  Better yet would be a small ceramic heater to stick inside the cabinet.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105061

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Is it PEX?

Yeah, at least there’s that. All the new pipe we put in was PEX. But still…now that I’m looking back, since it runs through the ceiling of a poorly insulated covered patio, 1) we should have better insulated that area, and 2) we should have insulated the HELL outta that pipe. Because from now on, we’re gonna have to drip the faucet with both hot and cold water running through it whenever we get a good freeze.
I ran the hot water on the interior taps that draw on that heater, they ran fine and hot. I’m thinking that if I do that again, and get some heat onto the pipe here at the sink (I have an extra length of heat tape I can wrap around the inside pipe to warm it up), I can get hot water running there again. Gonna be a project.
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HOOKEM4

HOOKEM4 5036

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Once again our waterline that feeds the washing machine has frozen. I ran some laundry late last night and went to run another first thing this morning, frozen. We will see if it survives this time like it did during snowpocalipse. If it survives, I am going the jury rig an tee with a valve at the outlet that can be turned on to drip down the drain when it is this cold. Old ass copper pipes are fun.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105061

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Once again our waterline that feeds the washing machine has frozen. I ran some laundry late last night and went to run another first thing this morning, frozen. We will see if it survives this time like it did during snowpocalipse. If it survives, I am going the jury rig an tee with a valve at the outlet that can be turned on to drip down the drain when it is this cold. Old ass copper pipes are fun.

My old man has his laundry room in the garage. He rigged up a 100w work lamp to shine on that pipe, it worked in 2021.
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HOOKEM4

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Posted
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1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:


My old man has his laundry room in the garage. He rigged up a 100w work lamp to shine on that pipe, it worked in 2021.

Mine is on the north facing exterior wall. It is inside the house but the pipe still freezes in the wall. I just need to drip it. I knew this from the last time so it is my fault for not coming up with a plan. Odd thing is it didn't freeze till day 3 the last time. I thought if I kept running laundry through it I could keep it from freezing. No dice.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105061

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Mine is on the north facing exterior wall. It is inside the house but the pipe still freezes in the wall. I just need to drip it. I knew this from the last time so it is my fault for not coming up with a plan. Odd thing is it didn't freeze till day 3 the last time. I thought if I kept running laundry through it I could keep it from freezing. No dice.

I wonder if heat tape wrapped around the pipe inside (not the kind on a thermostat, but the kind that is on when you plug it in) would warm the pipe enough via conduction to keep it open?
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HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 8905

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27 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


My old man has his laundry room in the garage. He rigged up a 100w work lamp to shine on that pipe, it worked in 2021.

Ha ha. I am in the same boat and did the exact same thing during last year's freeze. I have an old work lamp from my grandfather that gets hot as hell. Back from the good ol' days when no one cared about things like "safety" or "efficency". 

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phdhorn

phdhorn 6224

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One more time.

Precip over for CenTex, as expected not a big deal. Weather services did really good on this event, which is not easy.

Travel E of U.S. 77 today dicey - because icy. Take care.

Finally, a little "glad I'm not that guy" satisfaction by relative position comment.  Yesterday Austin had about 174 customers without power max in the day.

171 of them were my neighborhood.

Power went out about 9:45 a.m. Sunday. After the usual AE claptrap on their outage site, and a seeming update (2 hours est. restore, which was goalpost-moved about 6 times), they extended the estimated fix out to midnight (from about noon when they gave us that one). Missus and i said skrew that, we hopped on over to a nice hotel in Lakeway for the evening - good decision.  Then we read a cryptic share posted by our Bee Cave Mayor (Bee Cave has one and it's not (quite) Gomer Pyle or Helen Crump). She was sharing blamespeak by AE, stuff like "when the developer put this in he did blah blah.." and tech speak like "we need to have a loop return to allow multiple access to the location"  - sounded more like a sex ed talk on fertilization than electric stuff. But what got us was this part: "We have yet to determine the actual location of the break (although somehow they seemed to know enough to blame it on "someone digging" - yet no name, location, or purpose given. Ni-i-i-ce deflection). So "after 4 hours we have no idea what happened or where to try and find the problem." Beautiful. The days before, I spent some time prepping the well as usual with space heater and a few lights, always works. But now there was no power to it - would it be pointless? That was about my only worry, the rest I said we'd deal with if/when. But we were not gonna sit in a cold house staring at dying phones.  Eventually they gave "good news" on the outage app - our power would return by 7:30 p.m. Sure enough, neighbors reported power at about that time - followed by a flickering over the next hour - followed by power going out - again. Oops. No problem, you guys are pros. Apparently acc. to neighbor texts, power finally restored w/o flickering 1:30 a.m. We returned home from a great relaxing stay by about 10:30 this a.m. House warm water flowing(!) except for final stop (bathroom faucets). I opened cabinets and expect it to thaw, keeping an eye out for problems. But we have water! 

3 ice/major cold event, 3 power fails. Neighborhood is pissed. We're going to go to the mayor with pitchforks and tell her to get someone from AE out here to do a damn assessment of the infrastructure. If the neighborhood wiring is akin to the Douglas phone-on-the-pole on Green Acres, then we want to know so we can outlay to fix it. "The way it was done 50 years ago" is complete bullshit. AE ran a Usain Bolt dash out here in the 70's to claim electric here with Pedernales in the area. So now, you bastiges fix it. Yeah, like that'll happen. The '21 storm I can sort of understand (though we found out our outage was due to a transformer blow and power would have remained on otherwise). The '23 Ice Dump - again a piece of infrastructure went kerplunk and we were without for 24+ hours. This one? Proud to say that in the vast, great expanse of the Greater Austin Metroplex, one neighborhood - one tiny, lil' group of settlements - mine - was out - the ONLY group outage all day. We're gonna do some stuff and stuff to get some answers. Not cool. 

Most of the time, the fear and paranoia preceding one of these events is regrettable if not funny (though after '21 peoples' anxieties can certainly be more understood). But apparently in our enclave, if you get below 30°, those scenarios are real. This isn't a destitute area and we want answers - the authorities say they'll give them to us after this - but of course we'll see. But if it's time to upgrade something, then DO IT. 

I do have a 15K big honking generator that will easily power the entire house if needed. So why didn't I set it up? Good question but long answer. However next time I'll probably drag the SOB out and get it ready if needed. With this event, even with our recent history, I couldn't conceive of losing power - ERCOT had a lot, there was NO precip (at least power-killing kind) in this forecast, zip. I thought no problem. Wrong [Trump meme].

Half-confidently expect power to hold, if not we'll motor it to the hotel for another night. So much better.

So yeah, you weren't "that guy."

See ya at the next weather disaster - whether real or overblown. Stay cool.

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Homercles

Homercles 10205

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Yeah I lived in Oklahoma for four years and there were actual road treatments, houses with hose bibs you could drain and an electrical grid that wasn’t guided by fucking profits…strange that winter blasts were better tolerated up there 

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Grimas

Grimas 669

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Posted
2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


I wonder if heat tape wrapped around the pipe inside (not the kind on a thermostat, but the kind that is on when you plug it in) would warm the pipe enough via conduction to keep it open?

I bought some of those 10-hour chemical hand warmers and am gonna put one packet inside each insulated "sock" that I have on every outside faucet.  Not sure if will make any difference but I figured, what the heck...

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BillyGoatHill

BillyGoatHill 4312

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3 hours ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

If you have a hair dryer you might be able to thaw it.  Better yet would be a small ceramic heater to stick inside the cabinet.

Pernille Harder Football GIF by VfL WolfsburgS

Small space heaters work great or you can also leave your cabinet doors open to the let the warm air of the house in.

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Redneck Mutha

Redneck Mutha 7954

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Bought the insulated sock covers late last year.  I'm using those, and then covering them with the regular plastic covers:

image.png.d152507b02a724f643ec47381e1e3fdd.png

For previous snowpocolypses, just used the plastic covers with rags and everything worked out.  For some reason I'm not as confident this time around.

Pool pump will run until Wed noon.  

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gsoda3

gsoda3 3245

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The good news is that I know my boys will spend the extra time off reading, working on math problems, doing puzzles and holding spirited conversations instead of staring at screens...
 
200.gif
You never said your kids were asian
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South Austin

South Austin 52448

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28 minutes ago, texasdago said:

The good news is that I know my boys will spend the extra time off reading, working on math problems, doing puzzles and holding spirited conversations instead of staring at screens...

 

You could work those math problems with them, Super Dad.

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TexArcher

TexArcher 37762

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Posted (edited)

Hearing a rumor of drivers stuck in a traffic jam for 3 hours with no movement in Houston right now?  It's 27 and people are gonna run out of gas and freeze?

Surely this is at least somewhat embellished?

Nevermind, just saw the I-10 tweet from the previous page.

Edited by TexArcher
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Guest

Guest

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93% chance of cancellation for AISD. It's still going to get down to 15 tonight, maybe reach 32 degrees tomorrow. They don't want to add to people being on the roads or having kids standing and waiting for busses in that.

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South Austin

South Austin 52448

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1 minute ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

93% chance of cancellation for AISD. It's still going to get down to 15 tonight, maybe reach 32 degrees tomorrow. They don't want to add to people being on the roads or having kids standing and waiting for busses in that.

See, this is why the North won the Civil War.

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