Start of Winter in Finland

We got the first major snow of the 2022-2023 season over a week ago, and it’s been a good reminder of how Finland handles winters. Hearing the snowplow go past our apartment building, I decided to write about all the things I noticed about the snowy season since moving to Finland.

A snow-covered pedestrian/cycling path through a small forest

Swapping to Winter Tires

From the start of November is when cars should be changing to winter tires. It’s best to have two sets of rims to avoid damaging the tires, but rather than keeping the out-of-seasons wheels at home or in the cellar, you can also have them stored in a “Tire Hotel” that will protect the wheels and keep them at a reasonable temperature to avoid damage during storage. The storage price includes the cost to have the wheels swapped out as well, so if you don’t want to deal with getting jacks and tools for swapping tires and moving those heavy wheels around, it’s totally worth it.

There are two main types of tires, studded and friction. I have friction tires, because they actually handle snowy conditions better due to better grip, whereas studded tires are better on icy roads¹. Studded tires also cause more air pollution, as they dig into the road surface when the snow is cleared. In Helsinki, they’ve also started limiting studded tires on one street². You can certainly also hear when a car has studded tires, as they are very loud on bare roads.

Cyclists also have studded winter tires available, and yes, people do cycle all year round as the cycling networks are still maintained, and with proper clothing and equipment, it’s still a good means of transportation, and there are plenty of protected bike parking areas, especially at hubs like shopping malls which also have metro stations.

Reflective Clothing

When the Daylight Savings Time (AKA Summer Time) ends, the sunset is suddenly at 5pm and continues to get earlier (sunset is at about 3:30pm at the time of writing this). Therefore, there’s a lot of moving around in darkness. People in Finland are prepared though, and you can easily find reflective armbands and vests, as well as keychains that can hook onto bags. There’s also a variety of reflective clothing, including gloves, jackets, beanies, shoes, and pants. If you want, you can also use reflective spray to make non-reflective clothing more reflective, or add reflective tape. When driving, you can really tell the difference as any reflective item (at least, any GOOD reflective item) will stand out and appear to glow. The Finnish Road Safety Council has a great guide on reflectors.

In addition to reflective clothing, you can also find lots of small LEDs to attach to bags, as well as headlamps. Headlamps aren’t needed if walking around more urban areas, since they typically already have good street lights, but can be better for walking around quieter neighborhoods or on unlit forest paths. It’s better than carrying around a flashlight, especially since your hands could get pretty cold and tired from holding a flashlight the whole time!

Snow Plowing

As I mentioned in the introduction, hearing the snow plow inspired me to write this. Before the first snow even sticks to the ground, snow plow markers are set up alongside the edge of the roads and intersections. These are basically thin red tubes that stick up from the ground and help tell the snow plows where the road ends or where the curbs are. For me, it seems like they all just appeared one day out of nowhere.

When snow starts, the major roads get priority in clearing. Only major roads get salted, otherwise most smaller roads will have gritting³. Pedestrians and cyclists, however, aren’t completely left alone here. Sidewalks here tend to be wide and mixed use (outside of the denser parts of the major cities), meaning cyclists are allowed to use the same paths. The fact that the paths are wide mean you rarely have issues of cyclists endangering pedestrians, as there’s plenty of room for everyone to move safely. When it snows, these sidewalks are also maintained with plowing and gritting, even if they’re not directly on the road. There are lots of paths in Finland that are only for pedestrians and cyclists that offer shortcuts not available to cars, and these are well maintained, even in winter.

Apartment building maintenance companies will handle clearing the snow and gritting paths around the property, and unsafe conditions should be cleared up pretty quickly (it’s their job after all). Otherwise, the city maintains the public roads and sidewalks. If you have your own house, be prepared to shovel out the snow on and in front of your property. Also, if you don’t have a covered garage, you’ll need to shovel out your car whenver it snows. This is one advantage of living in an apartment (with an underground garage), you don’t have to worry as much about all that difficult winter maintenance 😅!

Cozy Home

Winter is a time of coziness, where string lights are put up everywhere (and because they use LEDs they consume very little electricity!), Glögi is available, and the sauna gets more use, especially after a nice walk through a snowy forest path. With snow on the ground, it feels less dark outside, as any light gets reflected up. It’s a great time to enjoy things at home, watch movies and TV shows, play games, read books, etc.

Humidity

With very low temperatures outside, the outside air simply can’t hold as much water. When that air is then heated up, the relative humidity drops, as heaters (typically radiators, in our case heated by district heat) don’t add any moisture. As temperatures drop below 0, you might notice more static shocks and feeling slightly ill. This might be a sign your humidity is low. A cheap battery-powered temperature and humidity sensor can last years, and in our case we saw humidity levels drop to 20% (or lower). This year we decided to get a humidifier. Technology Connections did a great video on humidifers. To summarize that, evaporative humidifiers are the best for managing the humidity levels, as they work on very simple principles and don’t just put suspended water droplets in the air (avoid ultrasonic humdifiers, especially if you have hard water). Evaporative humidifiers that work on dampening some paper filter (which are basically the same as swamp coolers) and running a fan over it do have risks of getting moldy, but we settled on a Finnish brand that uses a small heater to warm up the water to around 80C and keep it at that temperature, which helps evaporate the water more quickly while avoiding risks of mold and bacteria building up in the device (and it’s absolutely silent)⁴. This isn’t sponsored, it was just recommended by colleagues and seems to be a popular choice in Finland, although this does consume more electricity than evaporative ones, unless you are already using electricity for heating (as the fan-based evaporative ones use the energy from the heated air to evaporate water, thus cooling down the air that you have to heat back up anyways).

Disaster Prep

Since the start of 2022, everyone’s been more on edge about possible disasters, especially since the country to our east is a state sponsor of terrorism⁵. That said, Finland has always kept an eye on preparation, every modern apartment building has a civil defense shelter and there are many other ones in public places and commercial buildings⁶. In normal times, these places are used for storage or, in larger cities like Helsinki, as parking garages, metro stations, and sports halls. In addition to that, there’s even a website called 72hours.fi with recommendations on how to prepare for possibly being 72 hours without services such as electricity, water, heating, or the ability to leave even leave the home. I personally grew up in a place that had hurricanes and so some of this isn’t new, but it’s easy to also forget how much we take electricity and all other essential services for granted.

I feel very safe in Finland because of how well prepared everyone is and because of harsh winter conditions that everyone should anyways prepare for. After all, invaders of Finland would have to fear suddenly hearing the snow speak Finnish…