-15 and falling

So I'm up all night tonight babysitting our crazy homebrewed in-floor heating system in the garage. There's an electric water heater filled with water and antifreeze, an electric pump, lots of plastic tubing in the garage's concrete floor, and, naturally, just a few exposed water pipes under the laundry room, which overhangs a corner of the garage. So the challenge is to maintain 32°F plus a few degrees of insurance, which means tonight maintaining a 32° + 15° + insurance° = 55° difference between outside and inside, without running the system nonstop all night.

The dryer vents out into that corner of the garage, so I'm continually washing and drying the same two loads of laundry all night to pump warm air into the garage. Sometime after I wake up tomorrow I'll buy an electric heater to use out there.

Update: oh-bloody-hell o'clock: here's what Mathematica says about the temperature since yesterday at midnight; time in UTC, temp in °F:

DateListPlot[
  WeatherData[
    "KCMI",
    "Temperature",
    {{2009, 1, 15}, {2009, 1, 16}},
    "DateNonMetricValue"
  ],
  Joined -> True,
  DateTicksFormat -> {"Hour12Short", "AMPMLowerCase"}
]

Update: at five million o'clock we're 17 degrees colder than Barrow, Alaska, where they're enjoying the warmth of the tundra on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Update: half-past gah: trains make odd sounds when the temp is this low. Going around the curve west of town they emit strange echoing screeches and along the straightaway a block south there's a deep thumping beat as they speed through.