On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:24:43 -0600, Steve IA wrote:

Ann wrote:
On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:35:53 -0600, Steve IA wrote:
Neon John wrote:
...
It's most likely a combination of all the above. It is effectively
impossible to determine the exact cause after the fact. The co-op
person that you talk to will tell you that same thing, couched in
consumer-friendly verbiage.
Well, maybe a combination, but we still feel there's something we're not
being told. Maybe I better get my tin-foil hat out.

Thanks again.

Steve

Did you have your main breaker(s) off all during the outage? Soon after
I moved here, there a super-brownout (incandescent light bulbs just barely
glowed) that went on for hours. After that, I'm careful to disconnect
anything that might be damaged by low voltage whenever the power gets
squirrely.

No, didn't think of it. I'd probably be running out to the pole every
few minutes to 'see if it's on'. ;-)

There is some validity to the "recovery" thing. A common example is the
household water heater. The savings achieved by shutting off a modern,
well insulated heater set at 120F - say, while occupants are away
during the day - are disappointing. It doesn't take that much energy
to maintain the standby temperature. Your wood stove maintained the
temperature in some of your house, but not all of it.

With a fairly open floor plan and a lofted master bedroom it kept all
but the den (closed the door) and the spare bedroom (always closed)as
warm or warmer than we normally keep the house. The outside temps during
the outage were normal 20-40s, not like it is now, -5F. In fact, we had
to curtain off the loft as a lot of heat was going up there making it
+75F which is too darn hot for sleeping.

Assuming you ran
your furnace after the power came on and before the meter was read, a
house is a lot of mass to warm back up to its standby temperature in the
winter.

It's the old question of night-time furnace setback. Only longer. It
does save energy.

Yes, it does. And turning it off entirely at night would save even more.
I tried that for a while this Fall and the colder it got, the longer it
took to get the house warmed up to where it was approaching comfortable.
And there was a strong temptation to set the thermostat higher than normal
to get it to stay warm sooner.

But it does look like in your case there wasn't much to warm up.