Winter Wonderland...mostly

Pre-emptive apologies to our more northern friends as we're about to prattle on about the weather we've been having down here.  First things first...

SNOW!!!

That's right! For the first time since 1989 (according to family) snow stuck to the ground down here in the Coastal Empire. We got over three inches. THREE INCHES! The record for Savannah is 3.6 inches, so we were close.

Neta measuring on top of the sundial...which wasn't keeping very good time that day.

Normally we wouldn't get excited about snow, having lived through plenty of it in our years in Vienna, especially Snowmegeddon in 2010, but this was sort of special. It's not often that snow falls down here, and even less often that it accumulates. Keep in mind too, that we moved down here to escape snowy, wet, gray, cold weather. But still it was pretty to see, especially after the storm passes when you can walk around and take in the beauty of it, knowing that it will melt soon.

Here are a few pictures we took later that afternoon:

Icicles hanging off the greenhouse roof

I'm in the window to the right of the front door, working, while Neta braves the cold for a picture of the house.

The front pond has a thin sheet of ice on the side closest to the house.

Neta put breadcrumbs out for the birds. Apparently Lulu thought she put them out for the "bird dog".

This bird came to the front door...probably to complain about the theft of breadcrumbs.

The old camellia in the side yard.

Our big Live Oak

Snow along the banks of the big pond

Trees next to the little barn

Terrell's boat down at the big pond

Ice at the big pond

The little pond and the island

Despite the beauty of the snow, there is a downside to this cold weather. In this area of the country your well and tank are usually out in the middle of the yard - ours is. Normally the weather doesn't get cold enough to affect your water supply, but sustained low 20's or teens, just like the human version, will give you fits and headaches if you aren't prepared.  We were prepared...mostly, hence the "mostly" in the blog title.

Our well and tank. Typical for southeast Georgia.
The upturned cooler, with custom pipe cutout is an "after-market option".

To protect the water pipe going into the house, there is an upturned cooler that insulates the above ground portion of the pipe and keeps it from freezing. That's rural GA engineering. It's pretty effective down into the teens and for a night or two. Earlier this year I had also wrapped the pipe with insulating tape. Unfortunately at the 90 degree elbow the tape unwrapped and about an inch or so of the pipe was exposed. So on the third night of extremely cold (for down here) temps...that elbow froze. This was Wednesday night just as we'd finished washing up and getting ready for bed. We had just enough water to get by and went to bed knowing that come Thursday morning we would be dealing with no water.

The next morning our most valuable tool in the house was a hair dryer. I put it to work on that pipe for 2 hours. (I propped it up under the cooler. What? Do you think I stood there in the freezing cold for 2 hours holding a hair dryer?) That got the water flowing and all was saved. But we needed a way to keep it from freezing again, so off to Lowe's we went only to discover that they and all surrounding stores were completely sold out of insulating tape, heat tape and any other contraption and configuration you can imagine for thawing or insulating pipes. As you can imagine, plenty of people around here were in the same situation we were. We ended up buying a 60W halogen light bulb (nothing but LEDs in the house) remembering that we had a plug in socket for our extension cord.

The light bulb was all we needed to hold heat inside that cooler.

HA!  Take that Old Man Winter! Try and freeze us out will ya!!!

And on Friday morning...the water was barely trickling. Now what? I checked the tank pressure and it was almost down to zero. AHA! Must be frozen on the side coming from the well. This pipe:

The pipe coming up from the well going into the tank.
That one exposed joint was all it took to stop our water. 

Out came the hair dryer again. To hold the heat around the pipe I draped a towel over it. With the hair dryer pulling in the cool air, the output wasn't so hot that I had to worry about the towel catching fire. After only 5 mins, the tank began to gurgle and the pressure was restored. I was so relieved. Now what to cover that pipe with? What's the R-value of a towel...doubled up? I don't know, but it worked and Saturday morning we woke up to no frozen pipes.

It wasn't draped like this. I zip-tied it around the pipe to keep it from blowing off.
This is merely for display purposes.

This morning (Sunday) we woke up to trickling water again. A check of the tank pressure showed that the pressure was low. Back out came the hair dryer. Apparently my towel draping needed some work as there was a big enough gap for cold air to get in. Again, this wouldn't be normal over a night or two, but seven straight nights of low 20's or lower takes its toll. This time it took about 15 - 20 mins of hair dryer time, but again the water is flowing. So I set about the task of fully insulating that entire pipe and joint.

What I should have done in the first place.

I won't place a 100% guarantee on my work, but I feel reasonably confident with one night left in this cold snap and the temp forecast to only drop down to around 30.  We'll see.

At some point I'd planned to build an insulated pump house. Guess it's time to move that to our upcoming project list. But that's a whole new blog entry.