The truly epic Winter of 2020 is slowly winding down here on the East Coast. Snow storms are being replaced by rain events, and this week for a change we were greeted with back to back freezing rain events which left a very heavy coating of glitter all across town.

Ice coating our vehicles, houses & power lines was about 5/8" thick which was quite a burden to remove. I left our vehicles running with heat on high for a half hour which helped a lot in this regard.

Once loosened by heat from the vehicle, ice came off in sheets which minimized the risk of damaging anything on our rigs.

I fully expected widespread power outages but we were quite fortunate as this ice was not accompanied by high winds. We lost our power for about an hour and a half mid-morning so I finally got a chance run the house on my 3500watt backup generator. The generator is connected to a proper generator panel which powers up certain areas of the house including our well pump, basement sewage pump, freezers/fridges, a bunch of lights and TV/internet.

The storm could certainly have been a lot worse especially if we had wind. Thankfully it wasn't with everything else going on in the world this year. It was definitely the heaviest freezing rain build-up I've experienced in a very long time!

Cheers, MIKE

Copyright © 2025 Michael Smith