Thanks, Pete! If so, that would explain the hinkey electrical problems I’ve had this past week!
Three small lamps in the house would flicker, as well as a night light in my bedroom. A plugged in clock radio in the Family Room kept turning off then flashing 12:00. The furnace would kick on, then kick off - with the flickering lights! I set it low, so it usually doesn’t kick in until the wee hours, and it was doing it at 4am. Partial power is out in the barn. The main lighting works, but the chicken coop and Stew’s luxury accommodations have no lighting.
I thought it was a loose wire due to all the wind we’ve had, blowing back in some warmth!
This morning, everything seems to be OK. I’ll wait before I call the power company - which I was going to do first thing.
No problems like that here! Well, one, actually. the thermostat in a quartz space heater in the otherwise unheated part of my shop had gone “intermittent” even with the thermostat set at the top of its range. The power cord and plug seemed fine, so, I unplugged the heater, pulled the cover off, and discovered a push-on connector to the thermostat not tight to the spade lug it pushes on to. That had cause arcing, damage to the connector and lug, and a poor connection.
I pulled the connector off, cut it off the wire, stripped the end of the wire, and removed the oxide from the stripped end of the wire. (Kinda tedious to do right, with finely stranded wire.) Then I scraped down to bare metal on the lug (harder to do, mostly because it was hard to access that part of the thermostat, and the thermostat knob refused to come off, so I couldn’t pull the thermostat out.) Then I passed the stripped end of the wire through the hole in the middle of the lug, gave that one “wrap”, and soldered the wire to the lug. Test @ both low power and hi power: Worked great. I checked all the other push-on connectors in the heater: None showed signs of arcing, but, I tightened up a few that seemed slightly loose, then reassembled everything & put the heater back in place.
I mention this because those darn push on connectors often get loose with time and thermal cycling. I guess they are used so whatever they are attached to can be replaced easily (if the dang knob will come off, in this case!) but my experience is that they are a frequent source of trouble in various types of equipment, especially if subject to thermal cycling and / or vibration, and if the female connector’s material(s) is(are) suspect.
As for wind, the nuts (mostly hickory and some walnuts) and a few small branches coming down yesterday were... “nuts!”
At least it’s bringing in warmer temperatures. We’ll go from 20 deg. F below normal to 20 deg. F above normal. :-)
“Weather” ... we talk about it all the time on the Garden Thread. Personally, I don’t buy into ‘climate change, global warming’ & all of that stuff .... it’s “weather”. The earth has had warm spells and ice ages in cycles long before someone(s) figured out they could make a LOT of money scaring the crap out of people with ‘climate change’. People, plants & animals generally do quite well in warmer climes, but when it’s too cold, plants don’t grow & animals/people don’t have enough to eat. It’s hard staying warm & people freeze to death without fuel for fires/heat.
That being said, there was a thread on FR yesterday that was of great interest to me because back in the late nineties ... 1997 to be exact, a book came out by an author named Robert Felix & the book is “Not by Fire but by Ice: Discover What Killed the Dinosaurs...and Why It Could Soon Kill Us”. The post yesterday is “Climate scientists’ controversial claim Gulf Stream could be near collapse — predicting a new ice age” & here’s the link: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4352216/posts
Felix’s book left a lasting impression on me - I remember it to this day & it’s interesting that ‘climate scientists’ are now coming around to consider his original theory.
I posted on that thread about the 1997 Felix book & there were two replies to my post (to see originals, see’view replies’ on my post https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4352216/posts?page=8#8) - one was “I have a signed copy. A very interesting read, with actual citations and repeatable facts, unlike 95% of what’s out there right now.”
The other was by someone who “talked with Robert almost daily on his web blog “Ice Age Now” before he passed” and he gave a link to Felix’s site “with with all his years of news, updates, data, and charts if anyone is interested.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20180828070011/https://www.iceagenow.info/
So, if you’re interested too, there’s plenty for deep diving.