Reminder to check all the pipes where poison gases leave your house like at the dryer and furnace etc 'cause if they get covered up with snow you'll have appliances acting weird or maybe you'll get sleepy and can't think properly and then fall asleep and die #snowBastard2026 I should probably switch to electric appliances soonish huh
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No snow here yet, none expected until the evening. Temp has climbed to a balmy minus twelve. We've gone to one of the better local libraries to stock up on books 'cause we're sure as hell not going anywhere tomorrow.
How're my other #pittsburgh folk holding up
Kinda feels like the city's holding its breath
Back from the library now, hearing birdsong
It's very very cold and everything is charged up
I've told the water heater hey ignore the schedule and keep it hot in case of power outages, there's a little bit of standby loss but even in this waste-all-the-power mode it's still using orders of magnitude less energy than a normal one
Kiddo has a bag full of library books, I've got an ereader full of Stuff, and I'd be making cocoa except I've got this cat on my lap
Thinking, like... it's coming. It's coming soon
Snow didn't come yesterday, it got here while I was asleep
Only about maybe 8-10cm so far
Power just went out
Reminder to check all the pipes where poison gases leave your house like at the dryer and furnace etc 'cause if they get covered up with snow you'll have appliances acting weird or maybe you'll get sleepy and can't think properly and then fall asleep and die #snowBastard2026 I should probably switch to electric appliances soonish huh
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@ifixcoinops I had to remove the screen from our furnace intake to keep it from getting clogged with ice, which prevented it from operating at all. Fortunately, they're high enough above the ground that it's very unlikely the outlet will get blocked. And our smoke alarms are all CO detectors as well.
The furnace is the last gas appliance in the house. We have an induction range and got a heat pump water heater since our gas one was too small to fill our bathtub. It's basically parasitic on the gas furnace in winter, but it's great in summer. And eventually we'll replace the furnace with a heat pump, which I'm sure will make the neighbors happy since the current air conditioner and furnace are both pretty loud.
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@ifixcoinops How am I just discovering you're in Pittsburgh? All this time I thought you were in the UK.
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@ifixcoinops just curious as I grew up on red dust plains in very rural Australia and have never lived in a city with snow…
If you live on a Pittsburgh street on a hill, and it snows so much that school is cancelled and cars can’t drive, do the kids all just toboggan down the hill all day? Because that sounds pretty awesome.
@ifixcoinops It's very much like that 700 miles south.
Everyone knows it's coming, we're all just waiting.
@ifixcoinops snowbastard2016 is perfect