Here in northern Vermont we received over a foot of heavy, wet snow earlier this week. The temps have hovered right around freezing and the snow is sticking to all the trees and lines and weighing them down. There are widespread power outages.
At Snowshoe Farm, We’ve been without power for almost 48 hours. Fortunately, we heat with wood, so our house is warm. We’re also lucky that the temps are mild and not way below zero. It’s only November, after all…not even winter yet!
But we do not have electricity, so we do not have lights or water. We do, however, live in a very old house and the systems here are a bit dated. Our heat comes from a Sam Daniels wood burner that was installed in 1931. It’s not very efficient, but it doesn’t use electricity. The wood stove is in the cellar and a large grate in the dining room floor is how it heats the house. Very simple and not terribly effective when it’s really cold. But it’s a life saver during a power outage.
For the farm, the biggest problem we face during a power outage is the loss of water. We have a well with an electric pump, so there’s no water. We have a lot of snow, and the alpacas will eat snow, but we need to keep their water buckets filled. So that’s another role for our old fashioned heating system: melting snow for water. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of snow to make just a little water. But we’re well
on the way to filling up the buckets.
The good news is that the power company is here to cut down trees and hopes we’ll have power soon!
And thank goodness my cell phone is working!
Jane
Yikes. Melting snow isn’t too efficient either is it? It yields about half in water that it holds in snow. Yesterday my lights flickered again and I rain for a 3 gallon rubber maid jug and filled it. Not that it would help animals but I could at least drink.
I always encourage people to have at least one form of heat that is not dependent on electric power. Empire heaters can often run without power. You skip the blower. It’s handy and saves money regardless.
I hope you get hooked back up soon. Do you know where the outage originated?
Terry
Yeah, we’re lucky to have wood heat. We probably should have a generator, but really, we rarely lose power for this long. We can manage for a few days, but it’s super inconvenient.
They guys from WEC said they had tree on the lines somewhere south of us and also out back of our house. The lines go through the woods in back of our house and up to Green Bay. They need to clean up that short stretch. This is the second time this month we’ve had trees down on lines back there.