At age 64 I've kind of been enjoying dressing up warmly and going for nice afternoon walks at 30-40 below in the hills. It reminds me of exactly 40 years ago when I was first experiencing 40-below weather in Great Falls, Montana, and somehow seemed drawn to it. Of course, back then I never even thought of using hand warmers, and now I'm decked out with hand and toe warmers and more clothes than I used to wear back then.
But, at this older age, I tend to worry more about the "what ifs" related to heating. Fortunately we have redundancies, but I was pretty surprised just a few minutes ago to use the oil dipstick and find that we used approximately 8.0 gallons per day since I last measured on 12 January. We've had our pellet stove running almost non-stop upstairs, so only minimal oil usage there.
Prior to this, in the past 15 years, the most we ever used was about 6.3 gallons per day over about ten days at end of Dec 2009, beginning of Jan 2010. We were heating the entire house with oil then. Of course, measuring with the dipstick is probably subject to a +/- 5-10 gallon reading error.
Do you have recommendations for temperature records for these areas at elevation (e.g. 1,173 MSL for us) that date back 15-20+ years? It would be interesting to compute heating degree days at elevation, as well as down at the airport. I'm wondering just how much this absence of inversion has added to the heating. After a week or so sitting mostly around -30 to -40 up here, I have to remind myself that up until this past week, we hadn't seen anything this cold for our 15 years here.
Probably the most representative for your location would be the NOAA Climate Reference Network at Gilmore Creek Tracking Station east of Fox. The CRN is at 1140 ft MSL up on the ridge with many of the big antennas. This starts in August 2002 though there are a few gaps. Next would be the the Keystone Ridge coop station south of Murphy Dome at 1600 ft. MSL. That site has data starting in the summer of 1996.
Years ago a I did a HDD comparison between the Airport, Goldstream Creek and Keystone Ridge. The percent difference of course depends on what HDD base temp used, but as I recall using a base of 55F yielded about an annual difference of about 10 percent fewer HDD on the Ridge than at the valley sites.
At age 64 I've kind of been enjoying dressing up warmly and going for nice afternoon walks at 30-40 below in the hills. It reminds me of exactly 40 years ago when I was first experiencing 40-below weather in Great Falls, Montana, and somehow seemed drawn to it. Of course, back then I never even thought of using hand warmers, and now I'm decked out with hand and toe warmers and more clothes than I used to wear back then.
But, at this older age, I tend to worry more about the "what ifs" related to heating. Fortunately we have redundancies, but I was pretty surprised just a few minutes ago to use the oil dipstick and find that we used approximately 8.0 gallons per day since I last measured on 12 January. We've had our pellet stove running almost non-stop upstairs, so only minimal oil usage there.
Prior to this, in the past 15 years, the most we ever used was about 6.3 gallons per day over about ten days at end of Dec 2009, beginning of Jan 2010. We were heating the entire house with oil then. Of course, measuring with the dipstick is probably subject to a +/- 5-10 gallon reading error.
Do you have recommendations for temperature records for these areas at elevation (e.g. 1,173 MSL for us) that date back 15-20+ years? It would be interesting to compute heating degree days at elevation, as well as down at the airport. I'm wondering just how much this absence of inversion has added to the heating. After a week or so sitting mostly around -30 to -40 up here, I have to remind myself that up until this past week, we hadn't seen anything this cold for our 15 years here.
Hi Don,
Probably the most representative for your location would be the NOAA Climate Reference Network at Gilmore Creek Tracking Station east of Fox. The CRN is at 1140 ft MSL up on the ridge with many of the big antennas. This starts in August 2002 though there are a few gaps. Next would be the the Keystone Ridge coop station south of Murphy Dome at 1600 ft. MSL. That site has data starting in the summer of 1996.
Years ago a I did a HDD comparison between the Airport, Goldstream Creek and Keystone Ridge. The percent difference of course depends on what HDD base temp used, but as I recall using a base of 55F yielded about an annual difference of about 10 percent fewer HDD on the Ridge than at the valley sites.