Interesting. Do they really burst more, or is it just what people do, the way we stockpile food when there’s a quarter inch of ice predicted?
Perhaps you missed the word “decorative” in his sentence. A fireplace designed to provide heat will provide a heck of a lot more than once where it’s designed to look pretty.
I don’t understand the no insulation thing. I get that it is usually hot in Texas and not this cold, but wouldn’t you want insulation for hot weather too?
I’m willing to bet that few homes in the South have that sort of insulation. We get the same warnings here in Tennessee. For the past couple of days we were told to keep a stream of water running from the faucets, because of lows in the single digits. Today it got up into the 20s and the advice was to go back to just dripping water, which is what we normally do. That goes along with covering any outside faucets and keeping cabinet doors open to help warm the inside pipes under the sinks. For most it’s just second nature to do those things, though some people don’t and their pipes freeze.
For the first time that I remember, we are also being asked to conserve water - wait until the weekend to do laundry, take quick showers, don’t flush the toilet unless you have to. It’s been so cold that some water mains have busted. It’s not serious enough to cut off the water (like in Austin) but we will still have way below freezing temps for at least two more days. I filled some containers to have on hand just in case.
I think they’re talking about insulating the water pipes, not the houses themselves.Water lines pretty commonly run through parts of buildings that aren’t inside the HVAC-regulated zone in some places. This doesn’t happen here in Saskatchewan, because only an idiot would run plumbing through unheated parts of a building here, but then we have a slightly different relationship with cold weather than Texans do.
I see that Texas electricity has reached up to $9 per kilowatt/hour.
I was looking at that. I don’t understand the market mechanism for pricing electricity in Texas, how much of this is going to pass through to consumers’ bills?
The whole house, yeah. But to just keep one room toasty, and everyone in that room? It does the job, especially if it abuts a stone wall or foundation. Once the stone is heated it radiates for hours. Mornings suck, though.
All of it, if the owners of that power and the politicians have their way. They privatized their power there some years ago.
Apparently this is specific to this company, who were just acting as a market pass-through for electricity rates and taking some profit off the top.
But it looks like because of the deregulated nature of the Texas electric market, you had all sorts of options for how prices get passed through to you, so you could either be about to get hit with a massive electric bill, or with something that’ll get stretched out over years…
(bolding mine)
No, that doesn’t happen virtually every winter in the Houston area. It may happen once or twice a decade. I think the last time it was 28F for six hours down here was actually 10 years ago in 2011 (and yeah, a lot of pipes burst back then). It does not happen that often. I’m not really sure why you think this is the case. There are years when our “freezes” are temperatures barely hitting 32F right before dawn.
It is true that this scenario is more common further north in Texas - it actually does happen near annually in Dallas, but they also have slightly better infrastructure for it as well.
So, your response comes from fundamentally flawed assumptions. These aren’t common cold snaps down here. Not even remotely.
Worse yet, this time the temps got below 20F a couple days in a row and didn’t rise above freezing for over 24 hours. That’s a once in a generation event for this part of Texas - the last time it happened was maybe '89 or maybe '82 (and there were widespread power outages then as well - Texas isn’t good about learning from past failures).
Compounding this are all the people moving to the area. A lot of people have moved into the area over the last couple decades and never realized it actually can freeze here. A few years ago, before Hurricane Harvey, I was having a conversation with co-workers who were worried about it. I was telling them just to do the normal hurricane prep like they did for Ike, Rita, Allison, etc, and then having them tell me none of them lived in the area back then. They just have no experience with Houston weather events that don’t occur every year.
I honestly don’t know, but growing up there were always tales on the news of people having pipes burst, or burning their houses down trying to thaw them with blowtorches, etc…
I do know that the outdoor faucets are different here; the ones down there are super-simple copper ones, but here they have vacuum breakers, etc… which makes me wonder if they’re possibly frost-resistant versions. My outdoor faucets have never frozen, and I’ve been pretty bad about covering them in the past- even in 2011. (I did cover them well this year though!)
It doesn’t get into the upper 20s or colder in the city of Houston proper every year, but it certainly does most years in the suburbs and other outlying areas under the Houston media blanket. As for Houston itself, from 2010 through 2019 it got below 32F nine out of ten years, and in five of those years the winter low was in the 20s or colder.
According to the Sperling’s Best Places climate summary, Harris County has on average 8.8 days with subfreezing temperatures. I used to live in Brazoria County (south of Houston and nearer the Gulf Coast) and we could count on several “freezing” events every winter.
The region as a whole is in USDA climate zone 9a or at best 9b, which means the lowest winter temperature in an average year is in the low to mid 20s (zone 9a) or mid to upper 20s (zone 9b).
What’s noteworthy about this past week’s cold snap in the Houston area (and Texas as a whole) was less the depth of cold and more its unusually long duration.
Yes, I’m in one of those suburbs.
This is a different claim from earlier, which was “for six hours”. Temps in the upper 20s do occur with greater regularity than every 10 years. For six hours? Not often. It is more common north and west of town (Conroe, Cypress, and points north and west) but still not something that happens every winter.
And, to be honest, except those areas north of town, pipe wrapping and such is probably not as necessary. But it’s rare enough that people don’t think about it. Especially, as I noted, for the many people who have recently moved into the area and don’t often think about these things.
Not necessarily. The way the Texas power system is structured is that there are power producers (i.e. power plants, wind farms, etc…) who sell power on a wholesale market along the lines of a futures market to power retailers, who sell that electricity directly to the customers. And finally there are the local transmission companies who run the actual power networks that transmit the power from the producers to the end users.
Most people have fixed-rate plans that are locked in to some fixed amount for the term of the contract, although businesses and some people have variable rate plans- the ones I’m familiar with are pegged to the natural gas wholesale price. The transmission & distribution utilities also levy a fee as well- usually a flat rate or a flat fee.
To use my own plan as an example, I pay $0.04550 per kWh, regardless of what the wholesale market or natural gas price does (most variable rate plans are pegged to one of those, from what I understand). And I pay a similar, but slightly smaller rate for Oncor to deliver that power to me.
So most end consumers will probably not see a sky high bill, unless they’re counted among those unlucky souls who both have a variable rate plan AND kept their power on the whole time.
PS… one thing that’s becoming more and more common is for people to sign up with companies that maintain databases of plans, rates, etc… and who will automatically switch your power plan on some interval to keep you at the lowest rate. You can do things like say no variable rates, green energy, etc… and they’ll find the best provider for you and switch you automatically. It’s pretty cool.
I think you’re flailing here.
There don’t seem to be stats for the exact duration of wintertime lows for Houston, but it’s reasonable to think that when it dips to a low of 25F or colder at night as happened five times between 2010-2019 (19F in 2018) it was 28F or colder for at least 6 hours.
The bottom line is that “freeze” events in the area are sufficiently common that 1) people should prepare adequately for them (with the aid of government where necessary), so that 2) the Powers That Be don’t go into hysterical overdrive every time a blue norther comes through.
That right there is the flailing.
Ok, that point I can agree with.
But who says they aren’t? There weren’t widespread power outages and burst pipes in 2018. Or really since 2011 and before that in 1989. Homes around here are adequate to ‘typical’ annual winter weather, which does not include sustained cold below freezing.
SpaceCityWeather (great Houston area weather site) did a retrospective on major cold snaps in the Houston area ahead of the storm. And, as it happens, mentioned the low in 2018, which featured very low temperatures but daytime highs in the 30s.
The local news will always warn about protecting pets and wrapping pipes. That doesn’t always mean they are really necessary, but it is better to be safe than not.
Likewise, if there’s a mild tropical wave within a thousand miles of Houston, the local weather people will start up similar warnings about how to prepare for hurricanes. It’s not so much a lack of preparation but the need to make sure people are aware and informed.
No, it was a fair cop. The 2018 snap (mentioned at SpaceCityWeather above) in mid-January did feature temperatures at 20s or below for more than 6 hours. But it was also so notable that it got a mention in a feature on notable cold weather in Houston. It wasn’t ‘common’ at all.
But what’s adequate preparation somewhere like Houston? It virtually never snows in any appreciable amounts, and it rarely stays below freezing past noon on any given day. Mostly what I remember as a kid other than breathless announcements of impending freezes was having to bring in all the plants that would freeze from the front and back porches. Nobody grows that stuff up here in Dallas, because they’d either live inside, or be in/out every other day during the winter.
Something like this past week is just so far out of the pale that preparation for that is about like preparing for a meteor strike. Or for that matter, like me preparing for a hurricane while living in Dallas. I’m sure that it could be an issue someday, but it’s extraordinarily rare.
The big deal with this last one wasn’t so much the temperature/snow, but that the power grid shat the bed and so many people statewide were left without power, and by extension heat. Had the grid stayed solid, it would have been a notable event in its extremity, but not infamous.