Working Through a Prairie Winter
Cable that will not bend, batteries that die by ten, and the safety problem nobody lists: hurrying.
Materials behave differently
PVC-insulated cable stiffens sharply below freezing and will crack rather than bend. Most manufacturers specify a minimum installation temperature and it is higher than people assume. Warm the drum, work from a heated space, or wait.
Adhesives, sealants and expanding foam all have a cold limit too, and the failures show up months later when nobody connects them to the day they were fitted.
Batteries and tools
Lithium packs lose a large fraction of their capacity in real cold and will shut off under load rather than fade. Keep spares inside your coat, not in the van, and rotate them.
The actual hazard is haste
Nobody wants to be outside, so the ladder gets footed less carefully, the isolation gets done from memory, and the test gets skipped because the meter is in the truck.
Cold weather does not cause many accidents directly. It causes the shortcuts that do.
