Oh Ugh! I remember temperatures like that from when I lived up north & I don't think I could deal with them anymore. Try to stay warm & stay inside!

Yes - I remember one winter when my kids were very small, the temperature was below zero for over 24 days - something like that.

The furnace ran, at one point, continuously for over 6 days and I was afraid that it would literally blow up! It was impossible to heat the second floor, so we all moved downstairs and slept on the hide-a-bed in the family room in front of the fireplace. The water pipes for the upstairs bathroom were on an outside north-facing wall and we had to leave the faucets running at a slow trickle for almost a month.

So there we were - my husband, myself, two kids and dog all piled in a hide-a-bed. They were three-dog nights and we only had one dog.

Stay warm - stay safe.

Most of the time, "real cold" here is zero, but it usually doesn't last for more than a few days/nights at a time. We have below-zero temps rarely, but often enough that I buy plants which can handle it, not those wimpy southern ones which go prostrate at the mere thought of ice.

Why DO builders/designers put the water lines on the north outside wall?? I have the same problem at my house, but I pile up bags of leaves (the north wall is the patio/garden side and not in sight of other houses or passerbys) and -knock on the nearest tree-- I haven't had frozen pipes yet.

Anyone know anyone with a straw-bale house that is in the snow zone? I'd love to know how they do in really cold weather.

meldy, there are quite a few straw bale houses north of here in the sand hills, some have been there for close to 100 years and are still lived in although with additions built on.

There is a church in Arthur NE that is built entirely of straw bales and is warm in winter and quite cool in summer. Better qualify that, the roof certainly isn't straw bales.

In ther early days of settlers coming to the sand hills there weren't any trees so you either built your house of sod or straw or hay bales.

I remember once, maybe ten or twelve years ago when we got a run of minus 22-23 nights several nights in a row, and then weeks of below freezing around it. I had a crop of Easter lilies in and they were running behind and you could actually see the gas dials move on the tanks as the heaters tried to crank up an impossible amount of heat rise. Like Suzanne said, they ran continually and there was no room for even an hour's heater failure. I have slept in my g'houses on night like that.

As for the house, it's stucco over soft brick, three courses thick. That's over twenty inches deep on an outside wall and the old pre-plaster is stuck right to the brick, no lathing, no insulation and no dead air spaces. The old house stays very warm until the brick chills all the way through and then you are not going to get warm. It takes about three days of serious cold to chill the thermal mass off and three days of warm temps to heat it up.

I had a solarium built on to the windward side of the kitchen and it's helped tremendously by blocking out the cold winds, providing a dead air space and adding some thermal gain. About the same time, we bought a cast iron gas stove. It's a lot more bearable now in extreme runs of cold, but like Suzanne says again, it helps to burrow under quilts with a dog or two.

Gandle, thanks! I remember reading about that church, but (and this is embarrassing to admit) I thought it was in ND or SD.

Andie, I think my problem with thermal mass may be that I don't really understand thermos bottles! I mean, I do understand the difference between convection and radiant heat, and R-ratings mostly make sense to me; but I've never quite gotten comfortable with the idea of a vacuum -- a thin layer of nothingness - being sufficient to prevent my hot cocoa from turning into a slushie if it's sitting in the snow.

Seriously though, I don't think 20" of brick/stucco has quite the R-rating of 20" of straw-bale -- but I'm not going to get into the math of it because it gets complicated with having to know what the brick is made of and how tightly the bale is packed... but I'm pretty sure that when it gets bitterly cold, your house is warmer than my old southern-style Virginian rambler (southern-style in this context means d4m little insulation and no place to add more without a complete re-model). And the local tendency to think 'southern-style' is okay is why I plan to build my future home with LOTS of insulation -- I can get used to summer's 100* days, but no way do I want to shiver through winter's 0* nights, with or without the dogs.

It's Calliope with the old brick house. Most builders will tell you that brick is not a good insulator. The only saving grace to my house is how thick that brick is. It takes serious time to chill off twenty solid inches of it. I would venture a guess that straw bale is by far a warmer home and I would not hesitate to live in one. I only wish that insurers and builders would think out of the box as far as altenative building styles and materials. I've heard cob houses are a bugger to get insured, and I have no clue why. They have to submit policies under some ambiguous name like aplastic clay or some such thing. I can't remember, to be honest. But, the fact there are homes standing in G'britain hundreds of years old made out of cow patties, straw and earth should convince somebody it's a durable material, able to withstand a wet climate.

I still would like to build a cob house sometime in my life, and it needs to be soon, as I h'ain't getting any younger.

Calliope, I remember those days of 20 below zero. I think that was about 17 or 18 years ago because I was so glad we had a sitter that came to the house and I didn't have to bundle up my toddler to take to daycare. My car would literly scream in protest when I started it, but it did start. Don't think I lost any garden plants. Our house is all masonry too, hollow tile faced with brick on the outside and plater on the inside. Not insolated. those out side walls get pretty cold. Mine aren't as thick as yours. And we have the original wood windows which I refuse to replace becasue they are too good looking. We have some aluminum storm windows that are better nothing.

We had the antique windows in ours as well until we just got fed up with freezing all winter. I know those windows were in here in civil war times. The glass was bubbly and wavy and it just killed me to have them yanked out. We did find a fellow who needed antique glass for resoration work and gave them to him, gratis. It would have been a sin to destroyed it. What brought that about was an energy audit by our electric company. What an eye opener! We had fireplaces in each room, some closed, some not. When the wind blew, candles would flicker all over the house. After he got done with his calculations, he told us the heat bleed from our house amounted to having one window completely open at all times. LOL. We didn't have central heat at that time, and no natural gas availability. We got serious about correcting the situation and although it cost us some brass at the time, the energy savings were so dramatic, the power company called us to ask us if they could check our meter. LOL. We reduced the bills 40 to 50 %. New double pane windows in all but the three of the bedrooms. A solarium along the windward side of one ell of the house. Caulking. Capping off unused chimneys etc. I am still working on energy efficiency and have noticed that my plaster work around the windows in two of the rooms has closed off even more gaps and we finally got hot water heat and installed a modern energy efficient boiler and an European style ceramic encased hot water heater. It only kicks on once a day for a whole day's hot water useage. We did this all before the cost of gas doubled, and it did just about the time a main went through and we hooked on to it. It was money very well spent.

Suzy, I'm thinking that insurers wouldn't want to insure a hay bale or cob house because of the risk of fire.

And I know about old houses. Our St. Louis house was 100 years old & when people were getting scared about carbon monoxide poisoning I'd just laugh because there were so many drafts in that old barn we never had to worry about being asphyxiated.

However, at least down here, I don't find modern construction values much better. The houses around here seem to be built to look nice, but if you scratches the surface you find all sorts of problems from insulation to things like the fact that the builder nails drywall up instead of screwing it in.

I guess the only way you can make sure you're getting the kind of energy efficiencies you want is to build your own house & be very specific about how that is done.

Andie - loose straw is indeed quite flamable; however, once packed into bales the flamability decreases dramatically. Houses built with straw bales are *extremely* safe because the stucco applied over the straw inhibits flames from reaching the straw, and if/when the flame is applied to the straw, it does not burn well due to the compression and lack of air within the bale. There have been many tests, both governmental and private, which support the safety of straw bale construction for housing. I haven't read as much about cob, but I suspect that during the construction process there would be a potential for flamability equivalent or lower than the potential for flamability at cabinetry workshop, and that the finished cob wall would be not as impervious as stucco-over-strawbale, but considerably better than standard 'stick' construction. Mind, this is in regards to walls - if a burning log rolls out of a fireplace, it will likely set fire to flooring and carpeting, which is an entirely different issue for the insurance companies. I've been told that owners of SB houses usually find that fire insurance is suitable only for the contents of the building, not for the building itself, because the building is generally considered to be as fireproof as concrete.

"The ASTM E-119 fire resistance test for plastered straw-bale wall assemblies in 1993 passed for a 2 hour fire-wall assembly. In this test a gas flame blows on one side of the wall at approximately 2000 degree Fahrenheit (1100 degrees Celsius) while the temperature of the other side of the wall is continuously measured. The results of this test had no burn-through and a maximum temperature rise of 60 degrees Fahrenheit (33.3 degrees Celsius)." Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Straw_Bale_Construction/Characteristics/Resistance_to_fire"; because I can't say it better.

Thanks, Meldy for the specifics. Everyone seemed to know how safe they were but the people who write policies on them. LOL. As for cob and flammability, from the plans I've seen for building cob homes....the fireplacesare just an extension of the cob wall itself and is free-formed along with the wall. How's that for flame-proof?

My ex and I bought our very first new home around 1974. It wasn't an elcheapo, nor considered extravagant. What we ran into was a real eye-opener on construction techniques with certain builders. God, I hope they aren't all the same. The roof joists were spaced too far apart and the roof started to sag just one year after purchase. Dry-wall fell off in the family room. The wood siding was stapled into the frame. IOW, it felt very temporary to me after having lived in old homes most of my life.

Check out www.bluerockstation.com. This has an earth station house, built with tire walls, bottle walls and they teach straw bale building. This is somewhere south east of Zanesville Oh, near Blue Rock State Park. Cool place to visit. They only use the straw bales as insulation, using a post and beam construction. It was afeatured in the Jan. 2006 Ohio magazine.

There used to be a couple of rammed earth houses near here but our soil proved too sandy to have really good cohesion, I don't know if they are still standing. They were quite the rage about 30 or 40 years ago haven't heard much about them lately.

It can be worse.

Here is a link that might be useful: Each state's low temperature record

I too am living in a solid brick house (160 years old). And I've got wall-heating: Warmwater pipes are fitted halfway into the bricks (underneith the plastering) at the bottom of each wall. With that, the walls never get cold. That's the basic warmth, plus 2 wood stoves (kitchen and livingroom). Perfectly cosy and low heating costs: The stove in the kitchen heats up the water for the walls.

Maddie