Trapped In A Hotel
I know part of the reason I moved to Nova Scotia was to enjoy the beauty of nature. I know this includes, and consciously included, some majestically crushing weather. However, this is the third time in 13 months that a major weather surprise has taken out the power at my house. Last time it was 7 days before they got it back on.
And now we have a 3-month old, so we can’t camp out in the house with no power–without power there’s no way to heat the house.
So I’m in a hotel until they get power back on at my house.
So not much blogging until then.
And that doesn’t even approach the whole story of taking my brand new car off the road in the storm. Sigh.
Here’s the national news headline on this storm, with some quick comments on the last one: Snow blacks out much of Nova Scotia
Trish
November 15th, 2004 at 12:49 am
Time to get yourself a woodburning stove. Lousy primary source of heating. Lovely backup source.
November 16th, 2004 at 12:31 am
We have two fireplaces, but without the circulating fans (”Heatalators”) they are terribly inefficient, wiht something like 95% of the heat going up the chimney.
We also have a pellet stove, which may be just an Atlantic Canada thing–I haven’t seen them elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. Basically you fill a large hopper with wood pellets (really compressed sawdust), and an auger feeds them from the hopper into a the fire at a variable rate. The higher the rate, the more fuel, and hence the more heat. There is also a circulating fan system designed to make sure more of the heat ends up in the room and not out the chimney. Pellets are very cheap and are made with sawdust that is a waste product of lumber mills, so it’s enviro-friendly. They burn very hot and thus very clean–We used about two tons of pellets last year and the total amount of ash didn’t fill my shop vac.
Obviously, that’s not useful without power to drive the auger and the fans too.
A proper wood stove could replace the pellet stove, but the 99% of the time we have power it would be much less useful than the pellet stove.
The real problem here is that NS Power has an inadequate infrastructure, and has been skimping on maintenance to make the books look good. Last time we had a power outage was a hurricane, and there hasn’t been one of those in Halifax for over a century, so that’s excusable. This time it was a snow storm, and frankly there is no excuse for having a power system that can’t put up with a snow storm IN CANADA.
Sigh.
I bet it’s Friday before we have power at home again. And this week of living in a hotel means I have to put off buying the rec room furniture for another couple of months.