Since I arrived in Canada the weather here in Kitchener-Waterloo has certainly been showing what it can do. In early November I was treated to temperatures in excess of 20 degrees, just to lull me into a false sense of security. Within weeks, however, the snow had arrived, heralding the third whitest autumn on record, the snowiest since 1951. Having survived snow-mageddon, temperatures started going haywire. On the morning of December 23rd the temperature was 14 degrees below. By December 27th it had rocketed to 13 above, the highest December temperature in the region since 2001. By New Year’s Day morning it had plunged once more to minus 19 degrees, a swing of more than 32 degrees in just five days.

Since then we have been in the deep freeze. This afternoon the temperature crept to just above zero for a couple of hours, the first time it has done so at any time of day or night since December 29th. At 8:15 last Thursday morning it hit minus 28.75 degrees here – the coldest it has been for four years. However, all these temperatures are registered without wind-chill. Last Thursday was a relatively still day, whereas Friday, although warmer, brought a strong icy wind which made it feel even colder. I rashly walked across the parking lot at our local shopping plaza with my nose running. By the time I got to the store my nose was stinging like crazy as the moisture started to freeze.

Worse was yet to come that evening. My mother-in-law came back early from the movies having arrived to find her film was sold out. Turning on the tap, she found only a trickle of water coming out. Testing the taps upstairs, we found no flow of water, and just a little more than a trickle in the basement. We immediately suspected freezing pipes, knowing that if they were to freeze completely they were liable to burst and cause a flood. Having little experience of these things we called a neighbour across the road to come and have a look. He quickly identified the potential cause as the exhaust vent for the spin-dryer. The four-inch diameter exhaust tube ran only an inch away from the cold water pipe. Our neighbour had experienced a similar problem in the past where a build-up of lint had filled the vent, holding it open. We needed to go outside, and we knew we may be gone some time…

Our knowledgeable neighbour’s theory was on the money. The vent was totally clogged with lint. What was more, the icy wind was blowing minus thirty degree air straight down the exhaust tube, freezing the cold water pipe running adjacent to it. We took it in turns to lie on our backs in the snow, picking lint out of the vent above our heads with a knife. I have to say that I’ve found more pleasurable ways to spend a Friday evening.

With all of the accessible lint removed, the vent closed almost completely. My wife hooked up the hair dryer and warmed the cold water pipe. To our relief, the water started flowing normally within about twenty minutes. We’d had a lucky escape. If my mother-in-law had chosen a less popular film, the first we may have known about the problem may have been a flooding basement. I still find it hard to imagine a pipe inside our heated house getting frozen by cold air from an adjacent but unattached tube. I clearly have a lot to learn about the effects of extreme cold.