Loss of Power/Home Heating- Are you Prepared?!

we have the Brita-pitcher already..i just need to get around to getting new filters for it.1 for instant use.and some for later on..and as for the life straws go.they'll be bought next.and they'll be for back up for when needed.and will be in with bug out items..

 

When we moved into our BOL home on the lake I had one plan for heat and it was a free standing wood stove that would keep the house warm without electricity. That was the plan from the get go and will always be our method of home heating. Wood is my greatest resource here as I am surrounded by thousands of acres of federal oak forests. I use the Osburn 2000 steel wood stove. We get 10 hour burn times and it keeps our small two story walkout basement ranch cozy all winter. My stove sits in the basement where it gets good draft from a basement fireplace and exhausts through a triple walled steel pipe.

 

An electric drip coffee maker can be modded into a functional water filter. Use two paper filters, put an inch of activated charcoal in the bottom, cover with coarse sand. Not as good as a Berkey but a lot cheaper.
Berkey type filter candles are available separately, for building your own DIY Berkey using stainless steel pots or clean plastic buckets (food grade).

 

...aka cheaping yourself to death.

 

When it comes to heat we are in pretty good shape. We have a wood stove that is piped into our existing heating ducts and a couple of propane space heaters (one is a Big Buddy, the other an older open flame unit that I use in the barn). We also have a small travel trailer with a propane furnace. I try to keep about 4 cords of firewood on hand plus 100lb of propane...so we should be good for even a bad winter here.

 

I've got kerosene back up right now, I am going to put in propane this year. I can't have a wood stove due to Ins. reasons. Long term... SHTF, I'm not going to care about what my Ins. says.

 

I have a big cylindrical kero heater and have a few gallons of kero stored. But it is an emergency system I haven't used.
Nice to have ready though. If we get an arctic blizzard in Florida I am ready!

 

I have been wondering about this and what people do when they live in the city. I think if you lived in a high-rise, having a generator on your balcony would not please your neighbors. I think most apartment buildings, do not have back-up power. How do you stay warm during an outage when you live on the 3rd floor etc.?

 

Been around wood heat for most of my life, until about 15, never lived in a house without wood heat as the only source of heat. For longer term survival with wood heat, start with the chimney. Doesn't do any good to have wood heat if your are dead or outside looking at the smoking ruins. That is not meant as a joke either. My personnel choice is buy a good airtight stove with a re burn system and bite the bullet. Costs as much as a good rifle, lasts 20 + years, gets 50 % or more heat out of the wood, will burn for 12 hours and keep the house warm In New Hampshire. I don't like to burn wood that hasn't dried for at least a year, so you should have 2 years wood as a minimum. I prefer to have 3 or 4. Some of my friends swear by the russian or finnish mass heaters. They burn hot for a short time and then re heat the house with heat from the thermal mass. If starting from scratch, I would sure try out some of the new rocket stoves built on a design that heats a mass of something and releases the heat over a period of time and would love to hear from anyone who has heated with one for a few years. That said I have used 55 gal drum and a shaker box stove to survive the winter and both worked. Take a lot more fuel, a lot more care, and are dangerous, but they will keep you alive.

 

I lived in apartments on and off as a kid and figured out pretty quickly I would never be an apartment dweller.

For heat when the power goes out, 4 years ago I installed an all mechanical simple pilot light ignition heater in our house. After the forced air heater we had previously suffered an electrical failure, which was pretty much had the same effect as the power being shut off to it. Luckily for me I had two 40lb propane tanks and a 10,000btu/hr inferred heater.
This year I want to add two 40lb tanks.

 

Big Buddy Portable Heater

 

It says it runs on propane but also requires D batteries. Sounds great but what if you run out of batteries? Is it still a good unit? Also, I notice with electric heaters that the floor gets warm in front of them. What do you set yours on so the floor is protected?

 

No solution comes without the need for some additional supporting preps. Spare batteries, spare propane, some fire tiles, etc. Even if you had a fireplace or wood stove, you'd still need fuel to burn, a method of ignition, clean-up and maintenance supplies, etc.

The batteries are just for the fan...it works fine without the fan, but doesn't circulate the air. You could always improvise with a nice fan dance or a bicycle on a trainer or whatever your creative widdle mind can come up with to move the air. ;-)

 

Thank you for this ^^ that was what I was wondering. If it is a small enough space, the fan is not really needed

 

Got to thinking about the pellet stove and power to run it .
Seems to me that if you had a pellet stove with 12 volt DC motors for the fan and augers,
one might be able to have battery bank powered by "TEG thermal panels on the stove" for charging the battery bank which would power the fan and augers , and possibly more.
I plan to get some of those TEG thermal panels and supplement my own charging system .