We tend to take heating for granted. Sure, everyone grumbles about the increased cost of paying to heat their home during the winter… but we all expect heat to come out of the walls whenever we turn the thermostat.
But what if the heat didn’t come out of the walls?
Millions realized just how this felt during the ice storm that left people without power – and in many cases without heat – for over two weeks in Texas in 2021.
It’s easy to forget, but even if our homes are not heated with electricity, they require electricity to keep our heating systems going. What’s more, heating is reliant upon a supply chain that is increasingly as fragile as America’s power grid – who remembers toilet paper being about as valuable as gold during the dog days of COVID-19?
So it doesn’t take a world-ending event to have you and your family shivering in the dark or willing to trade your teeth for a tank of propane.
With that said, what are some alternative ways for you to heat your home that don’t rely on an increasingly fragile grid or supply chain?
Propane Space Heaters
Propane space heaters are safe for indoor use (provided that you don’t fall asleep) and have come down significantly in cost. While you’re still reliant on the propane supply chain to keep it going, you can prepare for a supply chain disruption by keeping tanks of propane around just in case you need to use them.
Even the smallest ones will keep a decent-sized room in your home so toasty that you’ll probably have to keep turning the heater on and off.
Fireplaces
You don’t want to be running one of these in your home without proper ventilation. That can kill your entire family in a matter of minutes. However, if you own your own home and want to be more resilient in general, this might be the prime opportunity to upgrade your home by building a fireplace or even a fire pit in your backyard.
A nice open fire is very cozy and a source of passive visual entertainment far more conducive to quality family time than the television, your mobile phone or video game systems. This ones takes a little more capital to get going, but when you’re sitting in your warm living room watching the fire dance – emergency or not – you’ll be glad that you spent the money.
Heating Stoves
Heating stoves aren’t quite as visually appealing as their open-faced cousins, the fireplace, but they’re far more efficient in terms of firewood-to-heating ratio. The exterior of a heating stove also becomes very hot, which makes it a good way to cook food and heat water when the gas isn’t coming through the pipes and there’s no electricity to do anything with it if it were.
Another attractive quality of heating stoves is that, while they’re not super cheap, they’re much less expensive than the world involved in ripping open a wall and part of your ceiling to build a fireplace and the chimney it needs to be safe.
No matter what your prepper time table is – two weeks without power or getting ready for the end of the world as we know it – an alternative, off-grid source of heat is absolutely essential. You need at least one and frankly the more options you have the better.
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