Weather

[lizkat]

Started raining here Saturday afternoon, and is still raining, so I feel badly for any working stiffs who had planned lots of fun outdoors for the holiday weekend. I remember when I was still commuting upstate as a weekend resident how disappointing that was on either Memorial Day or Labor Day weekends!

 

[Eric]

Have a high of 115 today, it's been miserably hot and we have "flex alerts" meaning if we overload the grid there will be blackouts, so we're turning the AC up to 80 in the day and using fans.

 

[fooferdoggie]

we are going to have power outage because of high wind and dry conditions.
with the republicans are going on about electric vehicles and blaming it on Dems.

Oregon Electrical Utilities Warn of Power Outages to Prevent Wildfires, Including in Portland’s West Hills​

Oregon Electrical Utilities Warn of Power Outages to Prevent Wildfires, Including in Portland’s West Hills

www.wweek.com

 

[fooferdoggie]

had some fairly big gusts riding home and a lot of dust and plant matter in the air. but to really bad 20 mph winds.

 

[fooferdoggie]

man the dust and smoke from fires is going strong. the air quality shows 75 but it seems worse. butter then 500 we had with the last fires.

 

[Renzatic]

The only time I've seen a sky like that was during the Gatlinburg fires a few years back. The wind pushed all the smoke south towards me. I remember thinking how weird it was that I could smell a fire burning a couple miles away.

 

[DT]

It's going to be a wet one! Yesterday after school pick up we came through some seriously flooded streets, at least we're already locked down ...

 

[DT]

This was spooky, close lightning sounds, long rumblings, and these clouds rolled up like an explosion, covered the sun in like 60 seconds (should've gotten a video ...)

 

[Nycturne]

man the dust and smoke from fires is going strong. the air quality shows 75 but it seems worse. butter then 500 we had with the last fires.

Near Seattle right now we’re sitting at 150, and it still looks better than that.

Very glad for our HVAC upgrade we got a few weeks back now. We can now run just the fan, which is helpful for capturing at least some of the smoke that gets into the house in the filter. Also seems to help prevent CO2 hotspots from forming when we need to keep all the windows closed for days on end.

 

[DT]

@Nycturne

Have you looked into an air purifier? Our big one (we have a few BlueAir), is a Classic 680i, WiFi, PM2.5, mold, pollen, smoke, almost 5 full air changes per hour in ~700 ft^2 - allows for scheduling, auto modes, built like a tank. Direct sales they're always offering some kind of deal (though they're also available through Amazon).

Air Purifiers & Air Filters for Clean Air in the Home | Blueair

Find award-winning air purifiers. Blueair purification products and filters use HEPASilent™ filtration technology and remove 99.97% of airborne asthma and allergy triggers.

www.blueair.com

We did a blackened grouper, hahaha, really lit up the skillets, it cleared the air almost magically, detected the AQ change, fired up full speed.

 

[Nycturne]

@Nycturne

Have you looked into an air purifier? Our big one (we have a few BlueAir), is a Classic 680i, WiFi, PM2.5, mold, pollen, smoke, almost 5 full air changes per hour in ~700 ft^2 - allows for scheduling, auto modes, built like a tank. Direct sales they're always offering some kind of deal (though they're also available through Amazon).

Our bigger problem is the general difficulty keeping air circulating and ventilated, rather than removing stuff from it. The HVAC has done the job so far clearing out what smoke gets in when we do open things up. But you bringing this up made me double check and it does look like the installers set us up with a MERV 11 rated filter, because of our allergies, but since it’s decently effective in the PM2.5 range as well, it explains why the HVAC is helping here. Still learning how the thing works to be honest, old house that only had the two-wire furnace controls before, so it’s all pretty high tech to me still. Since we are setup for these better filters than what we had before, we could even look at a MERV 13 filter during the late summer season for this stuff.

We tend to get CO2 level buildups in the house (gas stove doesn’t help), which a purifier won’t help with, unfortunately. Really need more houseplants.

 

[Alli]

We had two weeks where it rained every day. Three inches in two hours kinda rain. Now it’s been weeks since we’ve had more than a drizzle, while over the bay where we used to live has seen flooding. Crazy.

 

[lizkat]

We had two weeks where it rained every day. Three inches in two hours kinda rain. Now it’s been weeks since we’ve had more than a drizzle, while over the bay where we used to live has seen flooding. Crazy.

the rain rain rain schtick has moved up here. Guy who mows my lawn hasn't been able to find three hours (one to mow, two to go back and forth w/ machine) to cut the grass here for a couple weeks, place looks like someone forgot to make a late hay cutting. Soon I will need to borrow a couple of goats, gee.

 

[Yoused]

Spoiler: SF fog

(courtesy NYT)

 

[Nycturne]

Is that San Fransisco or a Stephen King film adaptation?

 

[lizkat]

We had some serious fog in the Catskills the other night. Kind of stuff would make you crazy if driving without fog lamps. the visibility was terrible between low hanging cloud cover and fog off the creeks.

I used to hate running into fog off rivers and streams in summer along the last leg of a trip up here from NYC. Whole jaunt would be going great, no traffic, wee hours of the morning and then BLAM, last ten or fifteen miles the roads follow a creek into the village near my place and the fog rolling off that water in the chilly air made visibility almost nil. So I'd have done 140 miles in a couple hours and then the last 10 were like in second gear, all out of fearing I wouldn't see a deer or some farmer's hamberder on the hoof just standing in the road. Then a last half-mile climb on quite a grade to my place. I'd get out of the car up here and catch sight of a night sky chock full of stars. What a difference 400 feet of altitude can make if there's no cloud cover coming up out of valley fog.

 

[DT]

Holy smokes, a total washout today, some peripheral effect from Fiona ...

 

[lizkat]

Holy smokes, a total washout today, some peripheral effect from Fiona ...

It's bad in Puerto Rico... total grid blackouts, 25 inches of rain some places.

 

[Alli]

We had 8 minutes of rain yesterday. Weird season.

 

[lizkat]

We had 8 minutes of rain yesterday. Weird season.

It's been like 60 years between times I can remember this: raining buckets from black clouds over the northern hills and my own front yard while the sun was shining over the house itself, backyard and meadow! Somehow the ridge to the south blocked passage of a little front for about ten minutes before the weather gods found second gear and finally pushed onward.