Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations The Big Chill

Sometimes we just have to laugh at it all or you could get depressed after spending the kid's inheritance and then something comes along through Mother Nature that just kicks my butt. Once again, you might be on to something Frank, There are benefits to Northern LMB over FLMB from, what I have seen at my pond. They are easier to catch on rod and reel, they grow fast when feed trained and they tolerate these twice in a lifetime southern cold weather freeze's we see every 40 yr's or so. However, the possibility of catching a 25lb lmb only exists when growing FLMB.

I am trying to figure out what would make the windmills quit in a scenario like this, we have been having strong winds, blowing snow and unbelievable wind chills, I would have thought the wind mills would have been whirring like a box fan. don't get me wrong, I think they are a huge unsightly joke and will never produce the amount of energy that they took to build and maintain but if you cant depend on them in a wind storm it makes the whole theory look like an even bigger waste.

Easy for me to figure out! They are made in China.

The reason I ask is close to where I live is a large coal plant which is going to be shut down soon and a natural gas plant Putin it’s place. Over the last couple years 1000’s of acres of solar farms have been put u. And our governer wants to be 100% fossil fuel free by2050. This scares the hell out of me. With our winters people will die if the power goes out. I guess a backup generator will be standard equipment now

Downrigger, I assume you are talking about a Xcel Energy (former NSP) site?

If so, which plant is it?

Yes that’s the one

Yeah, but those will be rural people who probably don't vote DFL anyway.

Ice on the blades makes the windmills quit.

I was a power engineer for over 30 years. I think we need to build some new nuclear plants. Turn some of those COE reservoirs into "hot lakes" in the winter. Good fishing year round.

Augie, if it's a no start issue with the truck, dump a bottle of 911 in the tank. IIRC 16 oz treats 50 gal. If you haven't been servicing your fuel filter/water separator on a consistent basis, it could be water in the fuel, or just summer diesel that is gelling up. I can run summer fuel all winter long if I treat it with an anti-gelling additive. Maybe dump some anti-gel additive in the fuel tank too.

If you can get a torpedo heater and point it towards the front of the truck, and cover the truck and torpedo heater with a few moving blankest or at minimum a blue tarp, once the truck temp gets up above freezing I'll bet it'll start. Be careful if you do that, make sure the tarp/blanket doesn't catch on fire or that the heater is too close to the truck to distort or melt plastic.

FWIW I understand the power is cheap in TX since there has been no implementation onto a nationwide grid, and no contingencies and regulations for events like these. It is capitalism rearing its head how to get the cheapest solution to maximize profit with little regulation.

For example: for additional cost you can somewhat weather-proof windmills with heaters to keep ice from accumulating. If you don't do that, and you detect ice on them, you have to shut them down or it will fling shards of ice at very lethal speeds. So it costs money to put on and maintain the heaters. There is no regulation forcing them to do so in TX.

Also natural gas is pumped via electric to the power stations, which is more efficient, cheaper, and less polluting than using a natural gas engine to pump the natural gas (a small amount of NG is used for pumping). But when the electric goes out, how do you pump the gas to the electric? You hope that a plant nearby is still running to get gas to the other plant. Multiple stations go down? Good luck.

How do you spur the coal economy as a politician? You blame all of these problems on green energy, when you should be blaming it on lack of preparedness and regulation.

It was worse than a no-start. It cracked right off no problem. Then it started fogging blue smoke out the exhaust. Looked like a tanker fire in my driveway.
That cleared up after a few minutes. I let it warm up and took off for town. Made it about a mile. Restarted once. Made it halfway back to the house.
Had it towed to a buddy's shop. Thawed it out over night. Crankcase was full of diesel. Drained it, changed the filter, filled it with fresh oil and it started right
up with no smoke. He drove it across town to the diesel specialist without further problems. So most likely it was just a stuck injector nozzle.

edit: Put 20 gallons in on Saturday, added half a bottle of Power Service treatment, which should have been good for 50 gallons down to -10. The 15 gallons
that were already in the tank had also been treated. I think it may have actually been colder than -10. Pops got his little Massey out the same day to move snow.
It started right up, warmed up, then gelled when he started working it. The fuel in that thing was well-treated and should have been plenty good down to -10.

Wife and I talked it over yesterday. We (she, really, and I didn't argue the point) decided that after 19 years and 245k miles we probably have gotten most of the
good out of that one and it's time to get a new one. So I've been shopping for new trucks today. I don't really need a diesel truck these days, so I'm going
to get a new Ram 2500 with the 6.4 Hemi. I've never purchased a brand new vehicle, so I reckon I'm due. Lately I'm only putting 6-7k miles/yr on the truck, so
with any good luck I won't ever have to buy another one unless I just want to.

Capitalism works well when there's real competition, not so well when there's not. In the case of Texas, renewables like wind & solar get subsidies from both the state & federal government that other plants do not. On top of that, renewables are not required to pay for sufficient batteries, nor back up power plants needed to cover when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine -- or freezing rain & snow. Thus, unsubsidized & unfavored nuclear or fossil fuel plants cannot compete and are closing down.

The disaster is not in the least surprising, as intermittent sources of energy have always ended being costly & destabilizing to the grid when they become a large factor. True in Europe, California, and now Texas.

Thus ends my comments on the subject.

We had no power for 3 days. Spent it at my daughters house. Power outage was/is massive. D/FW Airport shut down and stranded a lot of people. Hotel and motel owners made out real well.

Home now. No place like home.

When things thaw out I will head to my place at Bowie 60 miles North. Even though I do my best to winterize prior to freezes, I can’t blow 100% of the water out of the water lines under my trailer house. Under pinning doesn’t help. I expect to do some plumbing repair when it warms up enough to go there.

So sorry to hear about power loss & plumbing issues, Dave. We have a mobile home in Harrison County and were spared the worst in terms of power. Kept water running, so hope to avoid plumbing issues, but we can't reach it now with the roads the way they are.

We out of power and water and no reprieve from below freezing conditions . I don’t think that we have ever had over two weeks that never got above 27. Yesterday we had freezing rain all night and morning causing trees to fall . Sounded like gun shots all around. Mother Nature is really pissed

Unlike a lot of people around here ,I am pro wind. Not because it is any better than other types of power, but because it helps out the community and the farmer that is getting paid to have it on his land. Seems like everyone blames wind for the shortages of electricity. Maybe for wind to work you need many wind farms spread out all over the country. So when one farm has no wind the other farm a 100 miles away would. Also needs to be backed up by natural gas, because that is the fastest type of production to start up over coal or nuclear. I wonder the rolling shutdowns are for 1 to 2 hours, if you are out for days it is probably do to trees that have never seen ice for many years. Oil is well subsidized why else would you shut down your wells. The government pays you not to run. Same with grain farmers, they pay you to leave some of your ground idle. That way they control how much is around and there for the price. Hey in 20 years when our president wants the country to be on electric cars. We will have all kinds of petroleum run electric generators. They would be able to start up and shut down really quick.

I'm pretty sure that once this weather event passes, the after action report will show that there's plenty of blame to spread around. Plenty.

So, what did you learn from this, and how would you prepare differently if you knew it could happen again?

We hit -3 degrees, and the big pond is iced over and has aprox 8" of snow on it, but we actually came out of as well as could be expected. We have a propane fireplace and cook stove, so we had heat, and could cook, even during our multiple rolling blackouts. I will up my propane bottle size when the roads clear, and the propane truck can safely get on the roads. I had our propane company build a hose kit so I can fill our small propane bottles, and I'll get them to make another one long enough to run the generator at our house. I put a 3 fuel carb on it last fall, and it could run for days if needed. We had plenty of candles, clean fuel old school Dietz lanterns, and Streamlight LED lanterns. The LED lanterns worked great, and I'll get a few more of those. On low, they last 11 days, and they're the safest of the other options. Food, fuel, bottled water, and winterization of the chicken coop and goat shed, were all handled before the super cold weather hit. Those were the best decisions we made.

Plans here in Tx are to shut down some more if not all the power plants that are natural gas/coal-fired. I think it is a bad call. But not much I can do about it I do know we are the largest in the world when it comes to natural gas reserves and it is cheap and clean-burning. Leaves little footprint after it is set online. Way less than a huge windmill that is an eyesore as far as I am concerned. It also supplies a large workforce with high-paying jobs. And we are not buying from China who wants to take over the world economy. And no nucular plants where we store waste for a lifetime that will or can destroy every living thing around it. Solar power and battery storage are way too expensive and until we can do a better job on reducing cost and improvements in our batteries we should not make it a requirement in our lives. Ok, I am through with this because it gets me upset when I think of the politics of it all.

there are a lot of problems that will happen in a weather event like this. IMO It isn't cost effective to plan for these rare events. If so we would all have basements and better heat sources here in Texas, instead we have waterlines buried 12-14" deep and heat pumps which are EXTREMELY inefficient at these temps, and no real backup heat sources. Everyone will jump up and down and point fingers for a few weeks. I'm sure they will pass regs that will cost us more money in the short run,. 30 or 40 years when it happens again, and everyone and all the equipment is different than it is today, many of us will even be dead and gone, and the people running things will be shocked that this could happen.

That was a funny post BrianL

Al sounds like you got it covered!

This has not been a fun week, because we are novices @ this.

Rolling blackouts at home since Monday.
40 mins of power, then 40 mins of no power.
Certainly better than a solid blackout.
Even when power was up no internet and no TV.
No frozen/broken pipes that we know of yet
Hate to hear about your pipes Dave.
Worried about pool with 2 inches of ice surface.
Last night we sat in a cold, dark house with no power for 7 hours.

Office power out all day Monday,
rolling blackouts Tues, power off 2 hours Wed
And today full power all day!

Office Yesterday - We are not used to this in Dallas


Maybe the first time I've seen a snow-plow in NE Texas (Wills Point)


Pond Frozen in background:


Good Size Yote in Snow:

I guess I dont understand how much ice it would take to deactivate those windmills, with the wind chills we had around here I figured them things would whirring like a box fan in August, I can see where there may be some ice shards falling off but hell they are in the middle of nowhere, not like they in town or something, just stay the heck away from them for a couple days. just thinking out loud here.

FWIW that larger windmills have tips that can go supersonic speeds. That flings ice off possibly miles away, and up into air space where planes prefer to have no obstacles.

Near me in Cohocton, NY there is a large wind farm. Usually about 25% of them have the breaks on due to over-production of electric. Those things are monsters (and small compared to the ones they put in oceans), but you get a sense of scale when they sit up on top of a large hill, and the top half of the blades are in the clouds. Those tips are traveling from 3000' of elevation to 3500' in seconds.

Look up Cohocton, NY windmill images.

Want to devalue your property? Either you or a neighbor get one installed.

It is my understanding that the blades can’t be recycled and wind up in their own landfills.

I believe there is pros and cons on all sides. Coal plants have their issues same as nuclear. Same goes for solar and windmills. They just put up like 150 windmills right outside of the town I live in. I think they are pretty cool to look at. How many coal miners have lost their lives? How many nuclear accidents has there been? Solar and windmills still have a cost problem but are getting better. I think there is a need for all of them just ask people in texas about it. We should use all of are resources. Im no professional just mine own opinion here.

The solar farms can fry birds that accidentally fly into the concentrated sunlight, and the windmills can cut up birds that fly in the path of the blades. Just need to put a shake and bake factory nearby to eliminate waste