For want of a fancy de-icer spray, I’ve pissed on a few frozen keyholes in my time. It’s worked on bike locks and car doors. There’s something really amusing about being resourceful with my penis. “Lock froze? 'Scuse me while I whip this out.”
That reminds me, we were renting a ski cabin last winter and they kept a hairdryer by the fireplace for use in getting a draft going up the flue before lighting the fire. Sure kept the place a lot less smoky.
I’ve had my car freeze over like that before, and my usual method is just to chip away all the ice with a shovel, and use the key to break the ice around the keyhole. I’ve literally just swung my shovel at the car - the ice cracks but the car isn’t touched. It’s work, but it’s definitely doable. Sooner or later one of the car doors will open, and then I can start the car and heat it up, which helps immensely!
We keep a shovel in the apartment, and one in each car. Never know when you’ll have to dig your way out of the parking lot at work (or in our case, just out of the on-street parking!)
When I visited the UK a couple of years ago in the winter, we had a rental car and they had the most pathetic ice scraper I’ve ever seen. It was a small plastic rectangle that looked more like a coaster than anything else. A good snow brush/broom with a scraperis so much better (I need a new one actually).
I had this issue a couple weeks back. Got out the mini butane torch and heated up the key. Stuck it in the lock and waited a few seconds, door opened right up.
I’ve had doors freeze shut a few times, but they usually don’t ALL freeze shut, so I just get into the vehicle however I can, start it up, then push the frozen doors open from inside (it’s easier to push than to pull, and a little pounding or kicking doesn’t hurt either).
If you’re completely frozen out of the vehicle, you basically have to find something to chip or scrape away the ice. Little spray cans of lock de-icer are ubiquitous sights up here at store registers, next to the tic tacs and the cigarette lighters, but if you don’t have that, you kind of have to dig the ice out with a knife or something. I’ve gotten into locks by pouring hot water over them as well.
What really sucks is trying to scrape glaze-ice off a windshield.
There’s so much about living in cold weather that I don’t know. I think I might die if I lived in one of those places that snow.
Anyone here had to move to a cold place and had to learn all this stuff first hand? Do they give you a manual?
Specialized key deicer - if I go back in time to when I just had on street parking.
My neighbors drain their pool.
We blow out our sprinkler system. Also, we close off all outside pipes and make sure they are drained. Also, winterize the lawnmower - let the gas run out as much as possible (late in the season, very little gas) and put in gas preservative.
Keep a hat and gloves in the car. You can hustle between work and the car, the car and home - but then…you need gas.
Also - smartwool socks. They are da bomb.
More da bomb than that - a midwinter getaway someplace warm. That is currently not Texas.
Can’t say I’ve ever heard of someone not draining their pool at the end of the season. Seems both dangerous as well as damaging to the pool.
My parents don’t drain their pool and I don’t know anyone with a pool (and in Quebec, that seems to be everyone!) that does. They lower the water level below the pump/skimmer, but it’s still mostly full. The pump and heater (if applicable) gets turned off and a few other things are done to “close” the pool for the winter. Once it warms up enough in the spring/summer to make it worthwhile to do, the dead leaves and branches that have fallen in are removed, the water level is topped off from the hose and the pool is chemically shocked to kill off the algae and turn the water clear again. Then normal chlorine and pH balancing throughout the summer.
Key de-icers: are they all the same? Or is one brand better than another? With all this freezing and thawing, even though Pittsburgh’s been spared the massive snow storms we’ve still gotten some ice, and it’s much worse than in years’ past. My key’s been sticking in my lock a bit (keyless stopped working, expensive to fix) lately, so I’m wondering if I should have the de–icer stuff on hand.
Remote starter for your car. I start that sucker up when I get out of the shower and it’s nice and warm by the time I get in it.
God, yes. Remote starters are incredible. I’m getting a new car within the next 2ish months and it’s on my must-have list.
Since nobody’s asking new questions, some general tips…
If you’re going to leave your house for more than a day in severe cold, or if you know you have a water line in a vulnerable place (read: along an exterior wall), worry about pipes freezing and bursting. On very cold nights open the cabinets so the pipes get some heat and if you know freezing is problem, let the tap drip.
It doesn’t hurt to carry a down coat, a down comforter, or a heat-reflective blanket in the back of your car. You never know when you’re going to get stuck out in the cold and really, really, really need it. People hate driving in winter storms because yeah, you could slide off the road and damage your car, but even more worrisome is just how cold you would get before help arrived, should the car’s heater not be working after the accident.
Also, all winter, your workplace WILL have the heat jacked up way too high.
And snow boots and warm socks. If you’re sitting in your car for a long time with your nice suede heeled boots, the feet are the second to start hurting (after hands). And put on your hat!
Is this really a problem in places that regularly get really cold? Because I know that I never worry about such things, and it gets plenty cold here (3 degrees at the moment). Every house I’ve ever lived in - including one that was 100+ years old - has had more than enough insulation that freezing pipes was not a problem unless you also turned the heat off. (And I guess that’s another tip - don’t go out of town in the winter without the heat on! It would never occur to me to turn it off, but I guess you Southerners might not think of such things!)
I can’t imagine having a house where closed cabinet doors really made that big of a difference heat-wise. It just wouldn’t happen here; if the cold was getting into your house that badly, you were screwed, regardless of the position of the doors.
From my Michigan perspective, “drain your pool” doesn’t mean make it empty. It means partially empty it. As Philster said, the water weight is often the only thing holding the pool into the ground. You see, when the ground freezes, pools have a habit of popping out of the ground.
And for the record, by “gravity drain” my irrigation system, it obviously doesn’t get every drop of water out. It gets enough out that I’ve never had a burst tube due to freezing, though.
I’ve only ever seen two kinds of lock deicer, and the one in the can is better than the one in the plastic tube.
People who have never had their locks freeze are lucky. My old Kia, may it burn in hell, used to have its locks freeze several times a winter, usually when there wasn’t anything but a hard frost. Don’t lock it then like people have suggest, right? Locks freeze open too, folks, and that means you can’t keep the door shut which is even worse than fighting to get it to open. The best solution for the garageless is to put a cover over your car that hugs the entire frame, and keep lock deicer on hand for that morning when you went to bed thinking it wasn’t going to be a problem, but was.
I’ve never heard of anyone completely draining their pool at the end of the season - well there was the one person down the street who didn’t replace their punctured liner at the end of the year, but it wasn’t on purpose. Without water in it, an above ground pool will collapse under the weight of the snow given that snow tends to drift with winds and cover things unevenly, which of course destroys the pool… which happened to that fellow down the street. Instead you drain out enough water to account for the expansion when it freezes, and throw in a couple of winter floats whose purpose has never been explained to me before you put a heavy cover over it. In the spring it thaws, you spend hours fishing leaves that somehow made it under the cover out of it, and it’s good to go when it eventually warms up again.
Usually not. Since cold is anticipated, the insulation measures usually keep pipes from freezing…until there is a power failure. My great-grandmother’s house had a problem with pipes freezing a couple of times in kitchen, which was a poorly designed addition to the house, but we helped her get it sorted with a contractor who came to get the insulation up to par, but other than that a normal house in a snowy area will be fine.
A tip for icy weather not mentioned yet:
If you think ice is going to be a part of your life more than once in a blue moon, buy yourself a pair of these. You’ll slip on the ice a lot less often, and they only take a minute to put on and pull off. They carry them in stores here, but you might need to order them if winter is a new concept where you live.
And **california jobcase **makes a very good point: be very careful driving during wintry weather if you have a big vehicle with 4-Wheel drive. 4-Wheel drive seems to encourage magical thinking, and the drivers believe they are invincible…which is why virtually every vehicle you see that hits ice badly enough to cause a rollover is a SUV; they are more prone to rollovers even in better driving conditions, anyway, and ice and “I am invincible!” just make it worse.
I’ve never lived in a place with an outdoor pool. Here in Central Ontario, they’re used for maybe three months in the summer, and a lot of people consider them more hassle thean they’re worth, such that they don’t increase the value of a house.
Therefore, I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that the winter floats are sacrificial, intended to crush first so that the expanding ice doesn’t burst the wals of the pool. (Think of what happens when you accidentally leave a can of pop in the freezer for too long: it comes out all swollen and ruptured.)
What do the winter floats look like when they are removed in the spring?
Don’t have any practical advice here that hasn’t already been touched on, but I have a factoid that will likely horrify the Southerners: when the temperature gets into the single digits Fahrenheit, and you breathe in through your nose, your snot freezes. Wear a scarf over your face.
Good heaven’s, am I the only one who thinks “Don’t!”
If you can’t even get your car door open, how will you handle the icy roads?
I mean no disrespect, but driving on icy roads is dangerous, and there is little reason for you to learn how to do it. Look, my company shut down during the most recent two storms, and our state has all the equipment and materials and training to keep the roads open.
Stay home, the world can get along without you for one day. If Oklahoma invades, I promise we’ll sic Colorado on them.
However, if you are going out:
I would recommend wrapping plastic bags around your wipers instead of leaving them sticking up; strong winds could damage them.
You could try covering your car with one of those cheap 1 mil plastic ‘drop cloths’. (I’ve never tried that. I can telecommute, so I don’t have to.)
Get sand or road salt for your driveway. If your car is frozen shut, your driveway is a sheet of ice, too.
Check that emergency kit you keep in your car, and add a chocolate bar, candle, and matches. And a non-plastic cup. Make sure you have a blanket, too.
Wear (new and ideally fluffy) socks to bed.
First thing in the morning and last at night, run hot water from a your faucets. If you pipes do freeze, open all the taps and use the hair dryer ON LOW to try to defrost the ice.
I can not emphasize ON LOW enough, and start on the ends of the ice block, not the center. In fact, make sure you know where the shut off is before you start.
Other than that, just prepare for a tornado, and you should have everything you need. (You get tornadoes, don’t you?)