Posted on 02/17/2021 2:13:42 PM PST by amorphous
These are my tips for people in TX and other places where they don’t normally have power outages in extremely cold weather and no experience with that and may not know what to do.
These tips are based on my growing up in New England and also having lived in Maine and Utah, and having experienced multiple days of power outages in extreme cold. A number of houses I lived in either were poorly insulated and, in some cases, not all parts of the house had heat.
1. Check to see if any of your doors have a space at the bottom where cold air is coming in. If so, take a towel and roll it up lengthwise and put it on the floor pushing it against the door.
2. Check to see if you get drafts from any of your windows. If so, take some old papers (newspaper, junk mail, etc.) fold them up and stuff the cracks with paper. If you have no paper but have rags that will work also.
3. If you have a generator be sure to read and follow all requirements for ventilation – you can get killed otherwise. Do NOT use anything like a grill indoors. Go outside if you must and use it out there in a sheltered area for cooking.
4. Let all your faucets drip a bit to try to avoid having your pipes burst. If you have any hay bails you can also put these around the bottom of your house.
5. Consider closing up part of your house and only use a few rooms (preferably interior rooms or those with the fewest windows, since you lose a lot of heat from the windows).
6. Sometimes if you have natural gas you can still get hot water and your stove and oven may work even when the power is out. If that is the case do the following:
a. Take a hot bath daily, before bundling up for bed. This will keep your core warmer. (Notice that she says IF you have natural gas. I don’t.) b. Make hot meals like soup and drink hot drinks. (Hard to do without natural gas.) c. Avoid alcohol if at all possible as that may make you feel like you are warmer but actually makes your core colder. d. Washing your dishes by hand is good to warm up your hands. e. Consider making something like Boston baked beans from scratch at night. They need to cook in the oven at low heat (250-300 degrees) for 8 hours and not only taste good… they warm up the house a bit and smell heavenly! ((Again, hard to do without natural gas.)
7. Get out all your winter clothing items and layer up. Wear a hat and shoes or boots even if you normally go barefoot as you lose a lot of heat from your head and extremities. Wear multiple pairs of socks to bed and multiple pairs of sleepwear. You can wear a winter coat indoors during the day or spread it out on your bed for extra warmth at night.
8. If you have any sleeping bags crawl into one at night in your bed, covered by your other bedding.
9. Cover your head at night (best if you leave a bit of a breathing hole but you’ll still keep warmer than keeping your whole head out).
10. If anyone in your household sews, check their fabric stash for large pieces of polartec/fleece (the absolute best at keeping your warm), wool, or unused quilt inserts to use as extra blankets.
11. If you have multiple people in your family…. skip the social distance idea (unless someone actually is sick), and consider bundling up together at night. Warning: don’t do that with a baby though as some people have accidentally rolled over on their baby and suffocated them. Babies do well however in a sleeping bag by themselves or something similar (I had my son sleeping in an old fur coat I got at a thrift store when we were living in a tent.)
12. Got a dog? Let him/her come sleep with you in your bed… even if you don’t normally.
13. If you have young kids, try to make a game out of it… pretend you are camping indoors, or are pioneers, cowboys, or Indians. If you know your local history it may give you other ideas how to keep warm. Remember people lived without central heat for generations and most did not freeze to death in their house. For example, I once visited Plymouth Plantations (in MA) on a very cold raw day – noticed that the Pilgrims houses were all cold and uncomfortable despite having large fireplaces. Outside the walled town there was a reproduction Massasoit Indian village complete with long house… and they were having story telling there. It was toasty, comfortable and warm. They only had a small hole in the roof for opening for smoke from the fire and one door with a deerskin flap they closed. Multiple families lived together that way and slept on wood platforms with furs, so they were off the floor. It was a LOT more comfortable that the housing the Pilgrims lived in!
Mine didn’t want to start, it was so cold. I had to squirt a little engine starter fluid into the carb. Black smoke belched out and it fired right up, after that. Need to remember to keep starter fluid on hand.
We use a blow dryer on a low setting pointed at a vulnerable pipe. We have one wall that is poorly insulated, and this pipe is the one that leads to our kitchen.
If your pipes do freeze, make sure you know where you water main shutoff is, and know how to use it!
The year we moved in to our current home we didn’t know all the ins and outs of it yet. We had a deep freeze like this, and even though we had water dripping slowly through our kitchen sink, it was the cold water pipe that froze. We had hot but no cold.
Eventually the pipe thawed, but we didn’t know it had a crack in it until the thaw. Then swoosh! I could hear water running somewhere but didn’t know where it was coming from. I decided to check the basement. Oh my! Water pouring from the basement ceiling and one wall!
I was by myself, and it took me a couple of minutes to compose myself and then remember to shut off the water main, and then another minute to actually go through the actual motion of shutting it off. Four minutes of water rushing through a pipe that had a one inch crack in it. Lots of damage. Several thousand dollars, as I recall. Fortunately, our new homeowner’s insurance picked up most of the tab.
I wouldn’t wish a busted pipe on anyone.
6. Sometimes if you have natural gas you can still get hot water and your stove and oven may work
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Both may require electricity to work. Mine does as I found out during a recent 4 hour power core upgrade.
I heated a home for over ten years with a fireplace insert. A fireplace alone just sucks all the warm air out of the house and supplies a bit of radiant heat.
Yep, if there is a female in the house, there’s a blow dryer someplace. ;)
Make sure you have 6 inch exterior walls when you build. I’m so thankful I spent the extra money.
That’d be me! I only use it on my bangs though, anymore. I enjoy letting my hair dry naturally now, except my bags have a mind of their own!
I always keep ether on hand.
A secondary solution is to strip the siding, box out the window and door frames 2”, add 2” foamboard on the outside and re-side.
“I’ve filled up a tub with hot water and slept in the bathroom for at least 2 hours at a time for warmth,”
How does that work?
I lit a gas stove with a match when the power was out. Water heater has a pilot so didn’t need a match.
Two element ceramic and carbon element portable electric heaters which only use about 750 watts on low and 1500 watts on high, will heat a small room and can be powered by small generators.”
Small room = bathroom, closet or insulated chicken coop in barn.
A typical walmart electric heater will raise the temp of a 35 degree room to 55 over a number of hours if the 12x12 room is completely insulated. That means insulation in walls, ceiling and floor and plastic over all windows.
A $150 cast iron wood burner from Harbor Freight will work 10x better. Plus you can cook soup on it.
Two people, one sleeping bag! :)
An old guy years ago told me the virtues of big, fat women. They give you warmth in the winter and shade in the summer.
Get a propane-fueled Lil Buddy space heater and a couple of large bottles of propane gas for heating a primary living space that you’ve cordoned off from the rest of the house.
Get a propane-fueled gas camping stove for cooking.
Get some lanterns that burn liquid fuel like what you see at restaurant tables for lighting purposes. You should also have flashlights with lots of batteries, but if the poewer outage is of long duration these will likely run out.
Don’t be an azzhole. Make damn sure you have some air ventilation in whatever area you have these things in use.
Get a gasoline powered backup electrical generator to power appliances and maybe some lights, but if the power outage is of long duration you will need to rotate its usage. Always have at least five gallons of pure gas available before the crisis happens.
Have as many 5 gallon jugs of drinking water available as needed for your family before the crisis happens. Have paper plates and plastic utensils for eating.
Get sleeping bags that are designed for extreme winter temperatures. When you’re in the bag strip down to your underwear to let your body heat keep you warm. You can dress up when you get out of the bag.
Get a portable toilet seat with a refuse bucket and refuse bags. Your toilet probably won’t work if everything else is offline.
Get a 12 gauge pump shotgon with 00 buckshot, just in case.
Keep your feet warm and dry. Powder, socks, shoes yes even indoors. You can lose a lot of heat walking on cold tile floors.
See if your neighbors have natural gas/propane or wood heat. Ask if they would be willing to give you some hot water in a thermos or even allow you to come over and cook.
Be sure to offer to pay! If they refuse to take payment be sure to do something very nice for them.
I grew up in a 13 room colonial which was heated downstairs with kerosene oil stoves. A grate in the ceiling allowed some heat to escape into the upstairs bedrooms, but not much did. We doubled up on winter clothing and in those days, you could get insulated “snow pants”. They were similar to farmers jeans except they were made with a waterproof nylon over a cotton batting or polyester fiber...like a sleeping bag. We wore them 24/7 over lined cordory pants which we put on over leotards and a couple of layers of warm sox.
My mother made fleece bed caps for us so no matter what the temps were, we were warm in our beds at night. What sucked was having to dress and undress under the bed covers because the room was so cold.
Then, we’d all meet in the kitchen to huddle around the kerosene cook stove for hot off the grill frying pan toast for breakfast. It was so nice and warm in that little kitchen! We eventually installed a furnace and hotwater heat in each room as the stoves were a fire hazard and my mother was terrified of them.
Today, if I had my druthers, I would keep a wood cookstove with a water jacket and separate water tank storage for winter use and a gas stove for summer use.
I do keep hurricane oil lamps and they do help kerp a room warmer. The more the merrier! I run them on low for longer heat output. I tried the clay pot trick and it was next to useless. One oil lamp puts out more warmth than 5 claypot stoves. And having to keep up with the tea candles is ridiculous!
Wood heat is the best fallback for heating, cooking, and water warming. You can even heat a greenhouse and hottub with a dood wood gookstove.
If you have a bunch of money, your options are endless, but anymore, most of us don’t even have pennies to pinch so one has to be economical.
Some let the water run continuously at a reduced rate, and let the tub's overflow outlet deal with the excess. Seems kind of wasteful, but you can get more sleep that way.
“Consider closing up part of your house and only use a few rooms (preferably interior rooms or those with the fewest windows, since you lose a lot of heat from the windows).”
When we had the Big Ice Storm of 1976 up here in Wisconsin, we were without power for 5 days in below-freezing temps.
Dad grilled (charcoal) any meat that would go bad with the freezer off and he also had us all stay together at night in the biggest bedroom, then truly shut us in for the night, stuffing a rug under the door, piling on all the blankets and sleeping bags, covering the windows with blankets, etc.
The dog, too! It was kind of fun & adventurous. For a while. ;)
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