Emergency Heating and Lighting

hi and welcome to rosaret homestead today's video is about emergency heating and lighting and it is the middle of the winter time and so this information hopefully will be helpful this certainly does go to emergency preparedness and self-reliance and so largely what we're going to do is talk i'm going to show some things and just give ideas so we will get right to it in just a moment [Music] when any kind of a power outage occurs regardless of what the source is and you are going to be sheltering at home in the middle of wintertime the biggest threat of course is how do we keep warm light also is a secondary important thing but most important is that we will be able to keep warm so we're going to start just with a person so one of the things that an individual person can do is to make sure that you have layers and layers of clothing start with long johns then put on sweats or even pajama tops and bottoms that are generally in the wintertime made of flannel that's really good insulation and then have sweaters and caps and mittens and a selection of protected clothing for every person in your household and even some extras in case you have some other family members that may come join you so that's first and foremost is taking care of your own personal body heat next i want to talk about windows if you have lived in your house any length of time or your apartment or wherever you are living you are well acquainted with how the sun passes across your living quarters so generally speaking in a home there's one side that is going to be warmer in the northern hemisphere that's generally a southern exposure and one side that is going to be colder this is south to us and this is north and so this is our warmer exposure pay attention during times when there is not an emergency to how the sunlight streams in if it does to your home and you can use that to your advantage so if you have a window that is receiving direct sunlight then keep those shades open so long as it's not freezing cold if you can feel the warmth of the sun where it lands on the chair or the carpet or something put your hand and if you're feeling warmth from the sun then leave that window open until the earth rotates and the sun moves out of the angle where it's coming in everything else in your house keep the shades the curtains everything drawn so that you can preserve as much heat that is already in the house here are a couple of things that you can do to help with that now this is a roll of bubble wrap that we have had in our garage for probably 10 years this is left over from our move here and so if you have windows in your home that are single pane most windows these days are double pane some are even triple pane so this may not work effectively on those but if you are in an older home with single pane windows then you can cut this bubble wrap to fit your windows and then look what you can do is a flat side and the side with bubbles on the flat side just spray the whole thing with water and then you just stick it on your window like i'm going to stick it on my refrigerator right now and it stays on your windows and that way that will help insulate against any coal that is coming in now i just ran a test on this this week and i had it on one of our south ex exposure windows and i just peeled it off a little while ago it has been there for three days without moving and so the water won't hurt the window and it helps secure it for several days so that is one way that you can insulate your windows a little bit better i've just taken some beach towels and i've just rolled this in a long roll and if there's any cold air coming in under your door any door in the home any outside door then just put this right on the floor in front of the door and push it up against the door hard so this this would fit i measured it and it's a little bit short so i would have to use two of these but we have a big double wide front door so this would work for our front door and then this would work this is folding the towel the other way this is folding it the short way this is folding it the long way and you can even double up if you have beach towels you can do two and it's even heavier and it would they make these commercially but why buy them if you can just use what you have on hand and so think very creatively about what you have already in your home that you can use to help fortify your home against cold getting in and of course when the weather is warmer and we're not under emergency conditions it is always good to make sure that that your weather stripping is up to date and that you fill any cracks or anything so that you can make your home as airtight as possible if it's really really cold and power is down you have no furnace then what you'll want to do is to reduce the space that you are going to have to heat and you can do that by selecting a room now if possible select a room on the warmer side of the house we don't have one that would work so we would have to go more on the west side of the house you know you do what you have to do and we have high ceilings and openness we have a lot of area where we have no doors that there are no doors and it's just open through the dining room in the living room and back through here we have some bedrooms that we can close off so that's probably one of the areas that we would attempt to heat now something else that you can do is if you don't have anything that works real really well for that you can set up a tent on the inside of your house a little pup tent or a little four man tent and bring your family and bring all of your bedding all your quilts all your pillows all your sleeping bags into that one area either a bedroom or even a tent and if that's not possible something else that you can do is if you have a dining room table move the chairs out of the way and put a bed spread or a quilt or something up over the top so that then you can crawl underneath and trap just even your body heat would be warmer than being out so there are some things that you could do for that as well all right now we're going to go into the heat and light part we recognize that there are many many options out there and we're going to show just a few things five or six things and these are just meant to give you ideas with the hope that you will also do your own research and get what is very best for you one of the things to understand is that when we're talking about heat and light for emergency purposes there is a cost involved cost is inevitable and what our recommendation is particularly for heat is that you get the best setup that you can possibly afford because your life may depend on it after we did our video on the crisco candles which by the way is my at the bottom of my list i hope we never have to use those i do not like an open flame in fact we are recommending that you not use candles at all if at all possible now we're going to break that in just a minute here too so maybe it should be open flames that you don't use a number of you recommended the candelier the uco candelaire so i did some research on that we bought one and here it is right here and i think that this is a great idea when we did our video on the clay pots as a heating source with the little tea lights that gave off 400 btus we will not be using those clay flower pots we think they're too dangerous we don't want to take any chances this little candelier right here gives off 5 000 btus compared to 400 with the other set up now this takes three candles here are the candles that are in here so the way that this works is you just unscrew this and these are spring loaded so it automatically pushes the candle up so you don't even have to worry about that so i'm just going to go ahead and light these i was actually pretty impressed with this we ran it all one evening so that we could test it and it seemed to work just fine it gives off lots of nice light and then you just bring this back over the top and screw it in and you're set running it right now in front of the camera you don't get the idea of how much light this puts off but it really does put off a lot of light we also got an extra box of 24 candles just so that we will have some backup we may get another one of these now the thing that i like about this one is not only does it give off 5 000 btus and i tested the air rising out of that this area right here and it was over 400 degrees coming out and so that's pretty good now even 5000 btus gets lost in this room but if we were to put this in a closed area a bathroom it is enclosed behind glass so it is it is just kind of a semi-open flame so this is much safer much much safer than the crystal candles it is not all of that expensive and it gives out a whole lot more heat than the flower pots do another recommendation that we received from our viewers who are always so wonderful to help us understand things better was olive oil lanterns they burn clean and there are several advantages which we'll talk about in a minute and especially they recommended those from lehman's and so as you see i got an order from lehman but here's what i did i did not order their little lanterns because pretty much they just use pint jars in various configurations and so instead i ordered the guts i ordered the inside piece and the wicks and here's one that we set up to test and i'm going to like this so that you can see there you go so this flame is also not 100 open although you have to leave the jar open in one order for it to get enough oxygen but basically all you have to do is to thread the wick up through this little center place right here and then you run it this reminds me of a paper clip because you run it through the roundabouts on this so that it holds the wick in place you just run it through so that then the pull the wick down to an appropriate size and then you just drop it in the jar and then after it's in the jar you fill the jar with olive oil until the level comes up to just below where the wick is so it doesn't use a lot of olive oil it will burn for quite a long time this flame is completely clean it's bright and crystal clear it does give off a little bit of heat not a whole lot of heat the thing that i really like about this two things first of all olive oil is renewable you can always grow more olives it is not fossil fuel the second thing is and one of our viewers pointed this out which i thought was an excellent idea in your food storage if you have any kind of liquid oil and it has to be liquid you can't run any solid on this but any liquid oil that goes rancid you can use that for your fuel or any cooking oil that you will no longer be using for cooking because it is spent you can also use that so it is very versatile i ordered six of these parts and i now have six jars ready to go ready to get all set up in the very same shipping box that came in in the first place as i mentioned early on it there is a cost the cost is inevitable we would have to purchase candles for the candelaere or olive oil for the olive oil lantern for this particular one we need batteries d-cell batteries and so having a good supply of batteries on hand would be necessary for this one this is probably jim's and my favorite light when our power goes off we reach for these little lanterns and you can see here they come in a box of two we we get these on amazon i bet we have eight or ten of them we keep them by every door we have them in our trailer i have them out in the garage in our food storage area which it has some kind of dark corners and so this is a very bright light 1000 lumens so here it is it's very bright and then it also has different options so it has a bright a flash and then a medium i hold it like this when i'm going out at night to the greenhouse or to check anything you can also flip it upside down there's a nice little hanger right here that you could hang it in a tent this the batteries are in this compartment right here there are three of them right there and so we have a large supply of d-cell batteries and it's an expense but we're willing to bear that expense for really good light the next one is gold zero yeti 150 this is a pretty good setup you see it has an electrical charger and we keep this plugged in all the time and then when the power goes off we can disconnect the charger and it is a power storage because this will run for about 24 hours and as you see on the front it has several different things that can be used including usb a regular plug and whatever these two things are as well and you can also hook this up to be recharged by solar now the thing that the reason that i was first attracted to this was for lighting because we can plug this in and these little lights have a fairly long cord i won't undo it all the way and they can be turned on and off now that is not a whole lot of light but we get power outages here all the time and this is enough light if i have it by my desk that i can do my work at my desk now and they also come with these little clips that slide along this cord where you can clip it to different things and you can string them this will fit right here and then i can turn this one on and they are individually turned on above which is really nice and and i remember this cord comes out it comes out about 12 feet i originally envisioned well i could just put these all around the house and we could just have lights from this one little thing it would only take 20 or 30 of these but these are 40 bucks a piece today i checked on the website so this is a no-brainer no for us we'll just stay with what we have right here too expensive for us to do that with we'll use other things for light i'm going to go ahead and put the link on all of these things down below i will send you to the very basic gold zero site they have lots and lots of alternative light and power options that you can review there this is probably my favorite heat source if our fireplace is not working then we can use this it does take the bottles of propane right here or we can connect it to our big tank out back if we wish but we cannot have the propane tanks inside the house so we'd have to put the cord through the window or something or use the small ones now this one is flameless which i like a whole lot and it it is filled with safety features the other day it was really really cold in the garage and i was working out in our food storage and so i took this out in the garage and it really worked well for me i was working with cardboard i was cutting cardboard strips about i don't know eight inches wide and six feet long and as i was bringing the razor knife down a piece fell off and just hit it not any harder than that and the whole thing just turned off it didn't tip it didn't do anything except it just struck this and the whole thing just shut down so i was really glad to see that my son who stays with us between construction jobs all around the country i went out into his things in the garage and brought this one in he said mom did you know that i have one of these too and this is also these are both made by mr heater and i will put the links in he bought this one to keep his are you ready for this his golf cart warm when he wanted to do golfing in the winter but it sits right on top of one of those small cans as well and these things really do put out the heat jim has volunteered to come and light this for us so that we can see exactly how it looks when it is lit press the pilot ignition and then we can go ahead and turn the heat up from low to high and it should start to glow a little bit more depending upon how hot you want it mr heater is really our favorite and of course it's very portable we could put this in the truck and go off and have a picnic somewhere as well but beyond the mr heater type of heaters would be a generator and a generator in times of grid down is so wonderful because you save your refrigerator you can then run your furnace and other critical things and they make those with three different fuels now we would love to have a generator set up and we're sort of working on that right now we want one that will run on propane because we can feed it off of our big tank that we already have in place but again it depends on the availability of propane and what if what if what if and so that's why redundant systems are good and so the premier thing would be to have a solar setup and solar right now is way out of our reach i mean jim and i are in our mid 70s we're going to be dead in 15 years and we wouldn't have solar paid for by then so in any case it would be wonderful to have solar and if you have solar you're so lucky and good for you because once you pay for the equipment and then there's there will be of course upkeep on the equipment the energy source is free it's from the sun and so that would be great as well so we wish for all of you a safe winter and the ability to put systems in place that will keep you warm thanks for watching this video we appreciate it very much and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 394,484

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Id: DNZU6LMO-6E

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022