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To: brucecw
Please tell me what would be good indoors for cooking and keeping warm?
1,026 posted on 01/27/2004 11:24:01 PM PST by JustPiper (Register Republican BUT Write-In Tancredo for March !!!!)
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To: JustPiper
You can use a propane fish cooker for heat and cooking. Just crack the window a bit now and then. 5 or 6 years ago we had an ice storm that left us without power for three days and the fish cooker worked well but a little ventilation is needed. There is also a heater that hooks up to your bottle of propane that uses very little fuel and radiates rather than flames, good source of heat in an emergency.
1,034 posted on 01/27/2004 11:31:57 PM PST by eastforker (The color of justice is green,just ask Johny Cochran!)
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To: JustPiper
Please tell me what would be good indoors for cooking and keeping warm?

Personally I'd prefer a wood stove. :-) However that does require quite a bit of work to install properly, and isn't something that most people should attempt themselves.

Cooking indoors is problematic if you don't have a gas range or wood cookstove - probably the best thing to use would be a propane stove. However I'd recommend taking it outside to be safe especially if you're cooking anything that takes more than a few minutes.

Do not use a gas range or propane stove to heat your house - they don't produce nearly as much CO as some other sources of heat like a charcoal grill or even a kerosene heater, but they do produce some and it's not anything to play around with. A traditional fireplace is not very efficient at heating your house unless you have one of the metal stove inserts that are available - otherwise you can easily wind up with a net loss of heat. You're also potentially more vulnerable to the CO produced in the fireplace than you would be from a properly installed wood stove. (The problem is that any one source of CO may not produce that much but it can add up if you have several sources like candles or lamps, a couple of heaters, a camp stove, etc, etc. The danger gets much worse in a power outage situation because people often run several of these at once rather than just the "romantic" fire in the fireplace that you might have in normal times).

If you have nothing else, the best choice for getting some heat is to use one of the propane-fueled catalytic heaters - these produce much less CO than an open-flame propane stove. Even that will probably produce a little however, so you should make sure that you have at least a little ventilation and not run it more than it's necessary, and not unattended.

The advantages of the propane camp stoves and catalytic heaters are that:

The primary advantages of the dual-fuel stoves compared to propane would be the possible greater availability of fuel sources in an emergency, and that the fuel storage is perhaps slightly less fraught than it can be if one of your propane cannisters leaks.

Also never run anything like this unattended - camp stove, catalytic heater, etc. That's another big advantage of a properly vented wood stove - since there's little CO output into the house, and no open flame, it's pretty safe to let it continue to burn while you go to sleep. They aren't particularly cheap however, especially when you consider the cost of installation and maintenance.

Reading this I suppose I sound like one of the Y2K survivalists. LOL. Actually I was never extremely worried about Y2K since I do work in the computer industry and knew the amount of effort that had gone into trying to ease the transition. Some of my work has also been with power companies so I knew what their computer situations looked like and wasn't particularly worried that there was a great danger there. However all of this can be of great practical benefit in the aftermath of a hurricane - it can easily be a couple of weeks before power is restored. And yes, we've had to rely on some of this in the past in such weather related emergencies so it isn't just speculation.

1,070 posted on 01/28/2004 1:18:05 AM PST by brucecw
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