Frozen
It’s a Status Orange, they said.
It’s going to snow like mad and everyone should wear their thermal knickers, they said.
By midday Sunday you’ll be up to your knees in the white stuff and your bollox will be frozen off, they said.
They didn’t say anything about power cuts.
I got up early this morning by curse of nature rather than design. I went for a piss and after getting back into bed I realised I was wide awake and all thoughts of going back to sleep were pointless.
No sooner was I dressed than the fucking power went. It wasn’t snowing. There was no wind. The only reason for a power cut was some nasty minded individual throwing a circuit breaker somewhere just for the laugh. I need my electricity for two reasons – to make my morning mugga and to run the heating pump. Now I had neither tea nor heat. That is not a good start to the day.
I hauled out the old camping stove and fired it up. The kitchen filled with gas fumes that would probably give the Healthists a heart attack but my tea is more important that the risk of explosion. It didn’t exactly heat the room though.
What I hate about power cuts is the not knowing. Is it going to be off for five minutes or five hours? Or five days? Are they running around frantically trying to restore things or are they having a morning coffee break and they’ll get around to things when they’re good and ready?
After a couple of hours that had brass monkeys frantically clutching their crotches, the power came back. I lashed on the kettle to make a mug of tea that was more than lukewarm and reset the heating to fire it up. As heating systems go, it’s good but it does have an infuriating habit of resetting itself every time the power goes. So I have to reset the time, date, year and all the on-off periods during the day. That’s a lot of button pushing in a cold boiler house.
I had it all nicely set up with the heating running flat out when the fucking power went again!
And to add to the confusion, Herself had woken up and was demanding tea, toast and her radio.
The power is back now for the time being at least. I’m going to wait for a couple of hours before resetting everything and have just stuck the heating on emergency override. I’m sitting here with a heavy coat on over a heavy jumper and my hands are still blue and stiff.
I hate Winter!
Have you been rubbing viagra on them?
Don’t have any. Don’t need ’em.
Dear Met Eireann,
Arrah, will ya whisht,ya fuckin’ pansies ya!! You shouldah been on the road tah Moshcow back in ’41. They didn’t even have any winter gear.
Theydah told yah where tah shtick your orange ‘n’ yellah shite.
It should have been a White Warning anyway. Colour-blind idiots.
Beware the yellow snow……….
“And to run the heating pump”
Then get yourself a small inverter to power it. Most central heating systems should run from a 300 watt unit, but don’t waste money on a “Modified Sine Wave” type – they will burn out the controller, and possibly the boiler control circuit board. Get a “Pure Sine Wave” (same as the mains, and often better) model – they have come down considerably in price lately. If you haven’t got a spare 12 volt battery lying around you can run it from a decent car battery, but keep an eye on the voltage, although virtually every modern inverter will have an audible low-volt warning, and shut off before it’s too late.
The kettle is more important than the central heating. Are there battery powered kettles? It’s not worth investing in any other form of power source such as a generator.
“Are there battery powered kettles?”
There are some 12 volt jobs – aimed at people who want to have brew “on the road”. However most are very low power – typically 100-120 watts, to be able to work through a fag lighter socket – so they take ages to boil even a cup full. I use a 1kw mains powered travel kettle, but then I have a 1.5kw inverter in my car! It pulls around 100 amps at 12 volts, so runs from a second battery/split charging system. If you only want to heat water for tea/coffee etc, surely a small camping gaz (or similar) stove & kin tettle is the answer?
We had a similar annoyance about 6 weeks ago. I discovered there’s a national freephone number to report outages and get information – 105. Works from landlines or mobiles (Uk).
when you phone from a mobile they offer to send you text updates on progress.
World weather has gone whacky! We should have snow down and have had snow down for a month however, nothing zip till last week days were hitting 15c instead of -5c. Not complaining mind, you can have the stuff and I’ll keep enjoying the rarity of a warm winter.
No wind, no windmills.
No sunshine, no solar electrons moving.
Freezing, all the important people have got heating full on.
Guess who is expendible?
“by curse of nature rather than design”
The euphemisms we use. 🙂