I live near Minneapolis where it was -16° Fahrenheit last Sunday. When I went out to start my car, it did not start on the first several attempts. The car finally started and after backing out of my driveway, I tried to get my garage door to close. The batteries in my remote control must have frozen because the door would not close. I had to get out of my car, run up the driveway and into the garage, where I had to manually push the “close” button to get the door closed. As I was running back to my car, I had to step over the electric eye beam that prevents the garage door from closing on a person. When I put my foot down on the driveway, I slipped and fell down. Thank goodness the only thing that was hurt was my pride.

Finally, I arrived at the gas station to fill up my tire. After inserting four quarters into the machine, I tried to unravel the frozen hose from the machine and bring it to my car. The memory in the cordage was extremely stiff and it was hard to maneuver it over to my tire. After removing my gloves to get the caps off of the intake valves, my hands became numb after only a couple of seconds and I dropped them! I had to lay down on the ground to find them. The air valves on my tires were frozen and would not accept air. I found out later that these air valves have a tendency to fail in the extreme cold. After all this trouble, I was not able to accomplish my goal of filling my tires.

I started thinking about how things just don’t work that well in the cold; my car, remote control, tires and hands all failed due to the extreme weather here in Minnesota. One thing that does work in the cold is the Clearfield equipment that we have deployed all over the world. From Alaska to Tonga, we have customers that rely on Clearfield equipment for their critical fiber optic links. We design our products with these types of extreme conditions in mind. Our splitters and CWDM’s are rated to -40° C and our ruggedized patch cords will stay flexible even in the weather we had last weekend.

I wish that more things that I have to use in the winter were made by Clearfield.

By: Tom Warren