Yet More Winter

Another image from our recent punch of bitterly cold weather this February: An icicle hanging from the eave of our front porch after the most recent snowstorm. This one’s about a foot long.

Major Cold Snap

About five inches of snow have fallen in the last few days

February is turning out to be winter packed into a single month here in southern Ohio. We haven’t had much snow until now, but a lot of recent snow and record lows have made it a challenging few weeks. Tomorrow morning the temperature is pegged to fall to -13, with wind chills approaching 30 below. Already this morning, a temperature of -6 set a new low for Cincinnati beyond what was reached in 1936.

I went out to shovel snow from the driveway last weekend, with the temperature at about 2 degrees above zero. It took less than half an hour for my face to go numb. When I came inside, I asked Mrs. SR013 to feel my chin – it was like a block of ice. You have to be especially careful driving in this kind of weather, because even a fender-bender could turn into a life-threatening situation.

Winter Update

The forest behind our house
is looking pretty wintry

Snow flurries today. It’s like being inside of a snow-globe – big flakes swirling around. Cold, too. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Of Ice and Spend

We haven’t had much snow this winter, but it has been very cold at times, cold enough to freeze one of our sumps.

In my experience, sumps are not that common in California, because there isn’t enough ground water there to make them necessary to protect a house foundation. Here in southern Ohio, though, sumps are common, a) because there are a lot of basements excavated into the ground, and b) because frequent rain saturates the ground and makes removing the subsequent water from around the foundation highly desirable. You don’t want to come home and find your basement flooded.

A sump is basically a low point into which water drains. And then you need a pump in it to get rid of the water that collects there. This raises an interesting question, though – what if the power goes out? The pump doesn’t work. And of course, that’s likely to happen during a severe rainstorm, when ground water floods into the sump. There are various solutions to his issue, but the one we have selected is to have backup pumps run by a powerful marine (boat) battery. If the water level in the sump gets high enough during a power outage, it will trigger the backup, battery-powered pump, and the water will still be pumped through pipes out into the forest in our back yard.

But there are other issues, too. We have two sumps. Unfortunately, one of them is located outside, which makes it susceptible to weather, including freezing. And this year, it did. We knew because we could hear the pump laboring constantly – it can’t pump water through a frozen pipe – and yet the water level in the sump didn’t go down. I used a hair dryer (at some risk for electrocution) to melt the ice around the pump, but unfortunately the exit pipes leading from the sump were also frozen solid, so the pump still didn’t work.

And so our plumber came over. We are certainly doing our part to keep this guy in business, but anyway, he helped remove some ice from the pipes. And then we simply had to wait for warmer weather, so that the rest of the pipes would thaw. Luckily that happened within a couple of weeks, and the pump started working again.

The system of sumps/pumps that we have cost a couple of thousand dollars, when all is said and done. It’s worth it, though, for the peace of mind of not worrying if the basement will flood during every rain storm or snow storm. But even so, it’s not foolproof. The batteries for the backup pumps could die. Then we’d be screwed. So you have to check the monitoring lights on the batteries from time to time to make sure they’re still charged.

*Sigh* Maintenance.