Summer Freeze

We've had a mostly mild winter so far. This week though temperatures have dropped to minus 35 C, with some minus 50s when wind chill is taken into account.
So far my water pipes froze on Sunday (it was just minus 19 that day, but the wind was from the WNW which apparently is the correct angle to infiltrate the water shed. I spent five hours thawing everything out. My tool for that is a pistol-grip hairdryer, which has proven to be extremely useful. I never use it on my hair though.)  Then the hot water froze on Monday as soon as I got home from work, it froze in the tap before my eyes.* That was easy to thaw however, I just had to remove some mouseproofing flanges from around the pipe and turn on the hair dryer and blow some hot air down there for about 10 minutes. Supervised so it wouldn't burn the floor.

*Don't suggest leaving the taps open for a constant dribble of water, that freezes the drains, see last year's post.

To augment the infrared heater I have in my back room (I really like it, it does what they say it does, heats up the room all at once rather than just directly in front of the heater, plus it is safe to leave on when you are not there, and it's safe to have near pets since it doesn't have any hot parts, the outside is a wooden cabinet.) I like to light a fire in the woodstove.

The floor in that room is usually very cold though since it is above an unheated crawl space. I cover it with kilims and area rugs, but to really take the chill off completely I have a fire in my little wood stove. There is something about a wood fire that makes it more comfortable than any other kind of heating. It is warming without being too drying, and it penetrates like infra-red, warming seemingly from the inside out.

I split some thick poplar stumps to put in the stove and found a summer day frozen in time. These seem to be ants, some of them are still packing sawdust and eggs, frozen mid-stride.

Poplar wood is subject to some kind of beetle or fungal infestation sometimes that turns the wood as light as styrofoam. Maybe that's where it gets the nickname "cottonwood" sometimes (although some species such as black poplar produce catkins of fluffy cottony seeds in the spring which is a more likely source). The infestation seems to happen when the trees are still standing, and it makes the trees so rotten that they eventually get knocked over in strong winds. Trees infested that way are not very good as firewood.

The extreme cold has other bad effects: it freezes car batteries. The typical "block heater" cars are sold with in the north is for warming the engine block and oil, not for keeping the battery warm. You can take the precaution of plugging in your car but that won't guarantee that it will start, since if your battery freezes you will not be able to produce enough electricity for ignition. Then you need a charger or another running battery. And cars with electronics under the hood need a constant supply of electricity from the battery or they will lose their programming, something  I found out in a cold snap a few years ago. That means a costly tow and reprogramming at the mechanics.

Living in a cold climate is expensive one way or another. Either you pay a lot in electricity and damages, or you spend a great deal of time heating everything.