alt Hacker NewsLessons you will learn living in a snowy place
Comments
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:
24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68
How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc
How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F
Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
The main lesson I learned was I didn’t have to live in a snowy place. I left SW Michigan in 2000 and haven’t looked back. I don’t like being cold, but I loathe snow and ice.
Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.
Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.
A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.
Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
> 5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
8: that's why you have sharper slopes on the roof if you expect a lot of snow. Then it glide off.
We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.
One thing this article doesn’t cover (but probably should): shoveling snow has a fairly high risk of heart attacks (especially past 50):
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/snow-shoveling-can-be-hazard...
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
24. Check your attic. If snow blows in there because your roof is damaged then it will melt and slowly turn your entire house into fungi. The damage to your roof can be so tiny you wouldn't spot it and your attic could still fill up during a snow storm.
It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.
I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.
I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.
I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable
Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.