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It's Coooollldd! Lets Vent!

ATT and if I live long enough to get answered when I call them they are usually good about that. I don’t have an unlimited plan though, one day when I have the fortitude to wait I should get my plan upgraded.

Is there an att store near you? Or can you switch the plan online one day? I am sorry all this is going on for you though, I hope both ATT and the internet provider, or are they one and the same(?) Cut you a break on your bill!!

I did all this. I was even willing to pay whatever fee they wanted to open the warehouse. No luck.

I had a guy come out, he’s the one who told me it was the board. I called out of desperation, after I had jumped every switch I could.

Several weeks ago my Rheem gas furnace would not ignite. I did all the testing I know how to do. I even ordered a new circuit board. I finally was able to get a tech in. He did basically the same tests as me. Nothing, still no ignition. Then he tapped the gas valve with a hammer, and whoosh, it ignited and ran. He said that sometimes a failing gas valve sticks. It continued to run for the next 2 weeks with no problems while the replacement valve was in transit. Sometimes as I have heard said many times, the right tool is a BFH.

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It could still be the gas valve, but I beat the snot out of it with a pipe wrench lol.

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Basic comedy of errors. As I recall it They only do changes at the store 40 miles away, the closer ones are franchises and have limited capabilities BUT, the governor has issued a strong message advising us to stay at home as the roads are dreadful, and online I need to have my phone to verify with a text, the phone got left in the car which I figured out last night, we are going out with tools to pop the door open at noon. :woman_facepalming:

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For the past 28 hours, my power would go off every 5 to 6 minutes for a few seconds. When it would come back on, my outside heat pump wasn’t coming back and I thought it might have been fried. So, I turned it to emergency heat ($$). Still, when the power would go out and back on, it would take the heater 3 minutes to reset itself and start back up. So it only got to heat for 2 or 3 minutes before the power went out and it started all over again. The warmest it could keep the house was 60º, probably less overnight.

Everything appears to be okay now. The power company claimed they fixed the problem about 20 minutes ago and so far the power has stayed on. I reactivated the heat pump and it seems to be working okay, too. I was really afraid it was a goner.

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It should have a lockout so that it waits some number of minutes before it starts again, to avoid cycling off-on-off-on too quickly. Hopefully it is fine now! :crossed_fingers:

We have some sort of power surge protector from the electric company, but that doesn’t help with brownouts and other inconsistencies that are no friend to electronics.

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It seemed like it was some sort of switch at the power company shutting off the power every 5-6 minutes. The problem was widespread, and one person on NextDoor had measured the voltage and saw it gradually decrease over the 5 mins, until it hit a point where it went out completely, paused 10-30 seconds, then came back at slightly higher than normal voltage, only to decrease again over the next 5 minutes.

My heat pump seems okay. The inside unit/emergency heat had a 3 minute lockout period. I think the outside unit must have been longer because it wasn’t coming back, so I shut it off to hopefully avoid damage and to get the emergency heat going. Power seems okay for the last hour or so and the heat pump has gotten the house up to 63º so far.

However, has anyone ever tried to repair a heated bucket that stopped working?

Past noon now, but a little extension cord and a blow dryer will get the door open if it gets frozen shut again :slight_smile:

Thankfully we are slowly on the upward trend. It has been downright brutal since Thursday and while that is only 3 days it feels like so much longer!

The worst part is not the extreme cold ( that is pretty bad) it is the wind…

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Same. No water blows serious chunks.

intermittent outages here as well during last night and all morning. They happened every 10 minutes or so and were not long enough for our backup generator to come on. Just long enough to make the microwave oven display beep, and to shut off the gas furnace.

Our electric co-op map showed our area as a power outage that whole time. This afternoon they sent out notices asking customers to set back thermostats and turn of any unnecessary lights. That seems to have worked because the power drops stopped a couple of hours ago. But when the temperature goes down this evening and demand for electricity goes back up it may start back again. This morning the house was 20 degrees below our thermostat setting due to all the furnace cut off times. Imagine what Ukrainians are going through with their electric grid damage.

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Haha, look at the temperature shoot up when I got home and started a monster fire in my fireplace. The slow ramp is just the 4 space heaters. Incredible!

I might just survive this unscathed other than a big repair bill. We shall see.

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Major weather vent on behalf of my friend and my kid. My kid was house/pet/horse sitting for my friend for a week, including during the super cold weather and Christmas. They lost power and the whole house generator wasn’t hooked up to power the heater, and a phone call with the owner didn’t help with making that happen. The house stayed at 47º with the gas fireplace and one space heater going. The barn wasn’t powered by the generator. The power came back on Christmas eve, a horse lost a shoe, but we thought everything would be okay until we got back from Christmas dinner. A pipe on the outside wall on the second floor had frozen and water was running down all the way to the basement. What a mess. I helped try to clean and salvage as much as we could from the affected rooms, and got back to my own house at midnight. My friend and family came back today and now have to deal with plumbers, insurance, and major remodeling to 2 or 3 rooms on three levels of their house.

Was talking to my friend in Bucks County, PA, yesterday. She lives in a countryish area. Her power went out for 32 hours. Luckily she has a fireplace in the livingroom.

She pushed two easy chairs about 5 feet from the fireplace (one for each cat :grin:) and slept on the couch, getting up every couple hours to put more logs on.

By the time the power came back on, the kitchen, the coldest place in the house, was 30 degrees. I don’t know what people without fireplaces would do in that situation.

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Friends of ours have a house in Texas, and that happened to them in 2019 or whatever year it was. 15 k for plumbing, new drywall, etc. Sometimes there just isn’t anything you CAN do. I mean I can recall my mom help with winterizing our friends summer house, shutting off and draining the pipes, can’t imagine draining the pipes at my house here, it’s not set up for it at all.

Another fire started. Furnace guy is coming out today

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I don’t understand why modern houses still aren’t built with better insulation and more energy efficient designs. Even in warm climates that rarely get deep freezes, a well insulated home will help with summer cooling in addition to preventing damage during freezes.

There was another thread on this recently.

I found this especially bizarre when I lived in middle Tennessee. We got enough freezing weather every winter that everything should have been better prepared for it. Yet it wasn’t.

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My local city/county area plumbing code only requires a 10 inch bury depth for water pipes and freezeproof hydrants, and wellheads sit outdoors with no insulation or covers since a hard freeze never happens. Mother Nature said “gotcha” this week with a 5 degree low.

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