How to Survive a Winter Power Outage

we are the product Preppers Jonathan Kylene Jones and today we are going to talk to you about a little experiment that we had when we turned off our power in our home in January and didn't freeze to death so we'd like to share with you some of the things that we learn and help you so that you can survive when the power goes out thanks for joining us today we've spent hundreds of hours experimenting and researching what works and what doesn't work this presentation is one of our most popular and we teach this a lot because people are concerned about what happens in the middle of winter if we don't have utilities so thanks for joining us sit back and enjoy this presentation and we'll meet you on the back end stay with us till the end of the video and we will give you a link to an action plan this action plan will help you so that you can prepare your family to be ready to weather the storms that may come even without power thanks in this presentation we are talking about how to survive freezing temperatures without electricity this assumes that you can stay in your home that your home is safe for you to use this is not a wilderness survival class but it does provide some good points on how you can take care of your family in a crisis situation and you'll need to forgive us for using our darling little research assistance if you look at them you will see that their little chicks and their hands are also cold they're all red so this was a family experiment and they actually did a lot better than we did but all right let's get going so take just a moment and imagine some of the things that could happen that would result in loss of electricity or natural gas or both earthquakes there's a whole scenario of things that could happen and sometimes we don't want to think about those things sometimes we like to think those things won't happen but the reality is those things can and do happen one of the things we like to emphasize in our presentations is principles principles stay the same no matter what and the important thing about principles is no matter what tools you have your disposal if you understand principles you can accomplish what you need to based on what you have at that point in time some of these principles include the rule of threes which means you can survive three minutes without air three hours without shelter in some kind of a either a heat or a cold situation three days without water and three weeks without foods so that helps us a little bit put this in priority and mostly today we'll be talking about the three hours without shelter and some of the things that can happen in the cold we also want to talk about the basic principles of heat loss and these are very important to understand the first principle of heat loss is that of conduction and we lease we lose heat through contact with cold objects so if I go up in the mountain and sit on a cold rock that rock is pulling heat out of my body and my body is being chilled down because of that the second principle is out of convection or the heat loss due to air movement as you can see here our little test subject is feeling much colder than the outside temperature just because of the wind that is pulling heat away from the body the third principle is out of radiation and this is something that we do all the time we are continuously radiating heat into space so just because we are sitting here we're losing heat from our body the fourth principle is that of respiration and this is one that we often don't think about but every time that we breathe in cold air and we breathe out warm air we are losing some heat from our body the fifth principle of heat losses that of evaporation this also can be considered perspiration it is the evaporation of water off of our bodies that pulls heat away from our bodies and this happens very very rapidly when we're dealing with moisture and so that is one of the things we will emphasize in here is that we don't want to get wet we don't want to perspire but we do want to emphasize also the importance of being active so it's finding that balance and being able to stay dry ah hypothermia so there are a couple conditions that we need to really work hard to avoid and the first one is hypothermia sometimes we we don't think about getting hypothermia when you're inside your own home but it totally can happen in our little experiment I actually got hypothermia I was so excited about taking a nice hot shower that I didn't think it through and I got out of the shower and my hair was wet I didn't have any way to dry it and I just started sharing and shivering and I just could not quit quit shaking and then um I couldn't think straight like I didn't quite understand what was going on and finally I realized that I was in trouble and I went over to a neighbor's house and sat in front of their fire and the nice warm warm heat of their house because we didn't have any heat in our house but um it it really can happen even inside your home so we need to be very careful that we avoid the symptoms of hypothermia and make sure that we prepare in advance so that we don't let ourselves get into trouble one of the things that I want to mention here is that even at 60 degrees which doesn't seem that cold you can start having symptoms of hypothermia we often think it's something that happens out in the woods somewhere in freezing cold temperatures but it can happen in other in other settings including in our homes yeah we have to be very careful the next one is private frostbite doesn't that look lovely so what happens when you get really cold is that your body goes into a self-preservation and it takes all your blood supply to your core and away from your extremities trying to preserve life right sacrificing what is not vital for survival and that would be things like your fingers and your toes and your nose and and body parts like that the best way to prevent frostbite is to make sure that you have good circulation going don't wear things that are too tight around your like your boots don't tie them up too tight to cut off that circulation and make sure that you're staying warm so that your body doesn't go into that mode so that is something you really need to watch for ah then never going to chat about our experiment so back in my crazy days I thought it would be a great idea to turn off the power in our house so that we could really live what we teach and so that we could learn and so we had agreed I had agreed to do this for an entire week and it actually it was a great it was a great learning experience one that I don't ever want to repeat and what we learned taught me that I don't want to do this week we did things a little bit differently we set up some different precautions and and prepared a little bit more in advance so that I could stay warm so this is day one of our experiment and the inside temperature of the house without the heater is 51 degrees outside the high was 18 degrees and the low was 1 this was in mid-january so these are cute little girls the first thing we did was implement everything that we had been taught that we have studied and researched and one of my friends her parents had survived the earthquake in Alaska by setting up a family tent inside their family room so there the earthquake had damaged the fireplace that they had so that they could not use it as a heat source and they had no other alternative heat but this fan this family tent that's where they lived and did everything and even though they had these sub-zero temperatures they were able to survive so we decided okay we're gonna we're gonna try this and we set up these little pup tents these are $15 pup tents that we picked up at Walmart or something on clearance so they're it's not a big expense of anything and we set up two of them we set up one for the boys and one for the girls and what that does is it creates this micro environment so that you stay nice and warm the first night when we went to bed I John and I we went to bed in our own bed that was piled with blankets and we put the kids in the family room which was our designated living area in these pup tents they were in blanket sleepers nice sweats and things to keep them really warm in these sub-zero sleeping bags inside of these pup tents they were all lipped in and I I sat up in the middle of night and I was terrified I just knew that I had killed my little children and I went out and I I ran out there and I unzip this pup tent and this wave of heat hit me in the face and that kids were sleeping on top of their sleeping bags great they were so warm so the micro environment really works that's something that you need to tuck into your little prepper bag and remember that when you are trying to keep from freezing you need to create some type of a micro environment to keep yourself warm the second day the inside temperature was still 51 so we're really happy with our house it's doing a good job of maintaining the temperature the outside high was 18 and the low was minus one so the low was just a little bit lower the kids were doing great they were being really resilient John for the most part was doing really good but he would prefer to run around in shorts all the time and isn't really to the cold like I am on day three the inside temperature dropped to 49 degrees and that it's really cold to be 49 degrees in your home but look at the outside temperature the high was 21 and the lowest 12 but I think what was going on was our house had done a really good job of maintaining that heat that mass just held onto that heat and now it's starting to to drop which we would expect to occur and the thing about day three is I had done a valiant job of freezing to death all day with these kids while Jonathan went to work in a heated office building now when he tells the story he says that his he turned off the heat in his office yes I did yes you did but how cold can it get in the center of a heated building I want to know that not that cold so I wasn't feeling really sorry for him so I call and I said okay John I've learned everything that I I need to know for this I can teach it now and I'm freezing I am I am so done and he told me to put on a hat I swear he would be dead if he had been with me then I would I was not a nice person when all this is going on the cold and the dark was very hard for me to handle and so you know what I did I put on a hat and he was right I was significantly warmer so on this day we decided to experiment with some of our alternative heat sources this is actually our fireplace and if you notice there's a little bench in front of it now the natural gas if the natural gas supply is working will work but the electricity there was no power and so without the power the you could see the flame it felt really warm when you're right by it and you could sit on that little bench and snuggle up a little bit but it didn't do anything to increase the warmth in the room day for the inside temperature dropped to 46 and if you look at the outside temperature the high was 28 and the low is 16 so it's getting warmer outside but our house is getting colder and on this day I could quit so I did I said I have had enough I've learned and and then we made a lot of changes in her life because of what I learned okay and so we'll talk a little bit about some of the lessons that we learned one of those is that you can't survive this is this is very doable if you take a few steps and you want to take those steps now so that you can deal with a situation like this just briefly this past fall we had a fire that threatened our natural gas supply and until then I think most people thought well we just have these utilities and they'll always be there and I think it created an awakening in a lot of people that these things can happen there are freaking flukish things that can and will happen and we need to prepare for them and we can survive yeah and so in this case we didn't have natural gas but we did have power so all of our disasters or emergencies or whatever you want to call them come in different forms it's no it's not always going to be the same thing so prepared maybe to have natural gas and not power and also to have power and not have natural gas very good point so the big thing that I learned was that I'm a very happy person I'm very outgoing and energetic and I accomplished a lot but during this experiment the cold results in survival mode my productivity was shocked usually I can accomplish so much and and it was all about trying to get warm and then the combination of cold and dark it was very depressing because we made some mistakes when we prepared our house when we covered the windows we actually covered them with cardboard and we'll talk about that in a minute but what that did was it created a cave-like experience all day and all night and so we had our alternative light sources but that was the extent of it and it was very very difficult for me another thing we learned is that children and some wives are fascinated by open flames and that became a point of alarm for us as we were using a lot of candles and suddenly we have these little children sticking things in the candles and sometimes my wife encouraging that but so in our plan right you plan in advance and you say okay we're gonna do this so we have bought a whole bunch of beautiful candles right in the glass and some of them in the tins and and I thought okay this is gonna be really good this will be a nice safe way for us to have some light in different places and it really did not work out well open flame if you can avoid it should be avoided whenever possible all right all right to my lesson to wear a hat but take this take this to heart because I was significantly warmer once I finally decided it was okay to have hat hair and and put on a hat remember I'm functioning in a normal life I'm taking the kids to school and I'm trying to do all these things and I really don't want to look different than the rest of society and not have my hair done but I just gave it up and I put on a hat and I was so much warmer it's important to store some easy to prepare foods as Kylie mentioned sometimes you just don't want to go to all the work or you don't want to go outside did cook something out there on the barbecue or whatever so having some easy to prepare foods is a great thing and you can read a lot more about this and see a lot more on this on if you google the provident prepper safe indoor cooking solutions because it is really important to understand that there are some things you should not burn indoors when I first started to research I called a local Extension Office and asked them what would you do in an emergency to cook your food and the guy told me he said I bring my Coleman stove indoors and and cook on it well no no no no no no : fuel produces a lot of carbon monoxide carbon monoxide is bad and kills your family so you need to really understand where you're getting your information from and do whatever it takes to keep your family safe on this picture here we're using an alcohol burner and I don't know if this has ever I think this has ever clear in it it might have denatured alcohol those are our two go-to fuels for alcohol but alcohol is a great fuel to burn indoors but it does it's not as hot as other fuels so it takes longer and by storing those easy to prepare foods like the canned soups and the things that you just opened the cans and warm up that's really good when you're not feeling like cooking when when that productivity is limited so let's talk about tips and tricks for staying warm secrets now I learned a lot of these as we were doing our experiment the first one is to make sure that you stay hydrated because when you are dehydrated your blood thickens and think about this we're talking about frostbite what's the most important thing to prevent frostbite is that circulation if you are dehydrated you are putting yourself at greater risk of frostbite so make sure even though you don't feel thirsty you want to drink plenty of water that water should be tepid we don't want you to eat snow we don't want you to drink ice water because that's gonna cool you from the inside out and another thing along that line is eat foods that are high in protein carbohydrates and fats for energy so this is the time when the Snickers bar quite ideal alright keep your core warm so your core remember we talked about how if your core is not warm for your body will preserve or and go into self-preservation mode and it's gonna suck all that blood to your core to keep it warm so we want to keep that warm from the start so make sure that your head is covered make sure that your the trunk of your body is nice and warm think about the homeless people what do they do to stay warm they insulate they stuff newspapers or rags or other pieces articles of clothing between their coat and their body because that insulation will really help to keep that core warm and keep you warmer and get dressed warmly from the start don't wait until you're chilled to dress warmly because then your body has to recoup that heat we want to make sure that we are very wise with the heat that we are already producing store warm clothing you know we live in this heated world where you can actually go from outside to inside and you're always warm inside your home and that might not happen so store those more clothes than what you think make sure that you've got things for our kids we always needed to buy in advance so that we have the next year's warm coat for them so that I've always got a size that's going to fit them I go and watch the clearances at the end of winter and I buy new gloves when they're really inexpensive and just make sure that we are stocked up on everything that that we need to be warm dress in layers you remember how we talked about perspiration being very very dangerous when you sweat that that liquid the moisture just sucks that heat out of your body so if you dress in layers once you start to get warm you can take off a layer and prevent your body from sweating and putting you at a greater risk when you get cold you put on an additional layer blankets okay now I know that I've been traumatized by this experiment that we did and it has forever changed my life and so I don't ever throw away blankets now because we used blankets for so many things for dividing rooms more blankets on the bed so we just we used so many blankets when you have your furnace on in your home you don't need as many blankets it's good because you're comfortable but believe me when disaster strikes and your power goes out and you are freezing you are gonna wish you had more blankets so this is a top shelf in our garage and if you notice these are all containers of blankets at our house when there's a blanket that we are not going to use anymore instead of sending it to the goodwill I store it I don't ever get rid of them anymore because I know that these can be stored in the garage heat cold it doesn't matter right and so they're in these containers so that whenever there's a problem I've got plenty of blankets to bring down to stay warm and to share with those in need and I think that's a good point there will always be a need and we we strongly encourage be a be able to help your neighbors because not everyone is going to prepare as well as you are and so be be able to help them as well mylar blankets now every time you go to get your 72-hour cure your survival kit they're gonna tell you that you need mylar blankets and quite frankly mylar blankets are a really good thing however there are good wind and vapour barrier and they return some radiant body heat but remember how many ways do you lose heat five and it returns the radiant heat and it can prevent you help prevent from some of the convection yeah right but you're still losing heat other ways this is not going to replace a regular blanket so should you have this sure they're great for your your emergency kits but make sure that you have real blankets don't just count on this to keep you warm and then warm up on the inside so think about this and what you're storing things like hot drinks and soups and hot cereals anything that will help you warm up from the inside out is a great thing so put those into your storage and make sure that you keep them and rotate them be active and exercise so if you just exercise for 20 minutes you will stay warm for a lot longer after that exercise is finished but one caution is you want to make sure that you don't sweat we've talked about that right you you don't want to perspire so use moderation in your exercise but walking around and being active in exercise we'll really help you stay warmer now hand and foot warmers these are great but they do have limitations so be really careful about that one of the things about that they have a shelf life and so if you they're binding on your shelf for 10 years what's gonna happen is you're going to use them and they're gonna take a lot longer to warm up at least that's been our experience be careful my little nephew he was going to a a Klondike um but he put um foot warmers next to his skin inside of his sock to keep his feet warm and then when he took off the shoes he had blisters from it burning his skin they should never go right next to your skin so be really careful how you use them ah now bed warmers so these these are our little guys and and this obviously is not an emergency situation but they do when you put people in bed together they're it's great at keeping each other warm so think about that snuggle with somebody that you love and put people together so that you can stay warmer and be creative our girls went to girls camp and it was was it in June yes late too late June and they were none of them were prepared for it to get cold and they had a late was a snowstorm it was right it was a snowstorm and they didn't have jackets they didn't have anything in one of the things that their leaders told them to do is to have each one of them put a rock near the fire so that it would warm up and then they took that and they wrapped it into a piece of clothes or a towel and put it in their sleeping bag to help keep them warm be careful not to use wet river rocks or something as that they might explode but um you know you do the best with what you have so a heated water bottle um perhaps a blanket that you've put by the fireplace or by your alternative heat source and make sure that you're wearing a cap or a hat and socks special needs this is somebody who eat dearly love this is my father-in-law Paul and people in your life who are compromised and having a hard time paul cannot handle really cold like a healthy young person could right same thing with infants small infants cannot handle a really cold so you've got to make sure that if you have somebody in your life with special needs you plan more to make sure that you can maintain that temperature in your home so that they're not compromised the other thing is make sure that you're not burning fuels that will hurt them because a lot of times people with asthma or the older the very young are more sensitive to toxins that are in the air so don't burn anything in your home that's gonna put toxins in the air to compromise these people okay we're going to talk just a bit now about preparing and one of the important things will be preparing your home so let's talk about preparing your home obviously you want to make sure your home is in good repair you want to check around for places where you have cold air entry sometimes that's around a light switch or a plug around your windows and doors make sure these things are taken care of that there's weather sealing and other things that you can do to help keep your home warm make sure your chimney and your vents are in good repair and your roof is in good repair also if you've got pipes that sometimes you struggle with insulate them do whatever you can do to prepare your home this is one of the most critical aspects and this is not just for financial reasons you want to do this because you want your home to be resilient you want your home to take care of your family when maybe things are not ideal one of the things that you will want to do in a in a crisis situation is select a living area that you can live and be in but where you are not trying to heat the entire home some of the things you want to consider when you do that are maybe where you have kitchen facilities and bathroom facilities somewhere where you have the ability to take advantage of south-facing windows and you want to avoid rooms with large windows or uninsulated walls one of the things that I don't think we understand sometimes is the windows are there our friend if we can absorb a lot of solar energy through them but they are enemy because they do not insulate well they have an r-value of one maybe two the high-performance windows might have an r-value of two when your normal walls have an R value of 13 to 19 so they really are a weak spot as far as losing the the heat in your home basements are good if you have a basement because they have a lot of natural insulation around them and as we mentioned you want to confined your emergency heating to as small area as you can and so think about all these things you want to isolate that area as cutting mention using blankets or whatever you can do maybe you just can close the door but whatever you need to do to isolate that area and then you can keep that smaller area warm and take care of your family that way we talked a little bit about covering windows and Kylene mentioned don't do the cardboard as you can see here we thought it was a great thing and in fact from an insulation standpoint it did do very well but it also made it very dark so there are some other ways that you can take care of this there are plastic coverings that you can buy you can use visqueen six mil visqueen if you've got some tape or something obviously it you try not to damage your walls in the process but if that's what you needed to do to help insulate and keep your your home warm that would be a good thing to use painters tape might do less damage but it also has a shelf life just like duct tape does so be really careful and if you look at this we actually had the blinds covered too because they increase definitely the insulative value and you could hang your blankets over your windows too different you know very good point very good point so think about how you might do that how you might insulate oh and one thing that's really cool is bubble wrap you know that bubble wrap that you get from when you have packages shipped to you if you spray your window with water that bubble wrap will actually adhere to the window with just being sprayed with water and that will allow the light in and give you some insulative value you can talk take advantage of passive solar energy i mentioned that just a little bit before but if you have a south-facing window in the northern hemisphere you can absorb a lot of that energy to do that you do need to have some mass to be able to absorb that energy but this is an excellent way this is a picture taken in our solarium in our solarium on a good sunny winter day is very very warm it climbs into the 80s and it's just a beautiful place to sit and also in our home above that solarium door which you can see here above the door we have a fan that's thermostatically-controlled and when that temperature gets up to about 80 degrees then it starts exporting that heat into the rest of the house we also have in this room our wood-burning stove and we'll talk about that in a little bit the thing that's critical to remember here is once that Sun is gone or if you don't have a Sun on a certain day then those windows need to be covered and we have in our solarium insulated blinds so that when we are not getting any energy in we're insulating to keep what we've got yeah and remember how I told you I was traumatized by your experiment we actually built a different house right and we implemented things like this solarium so that I could stay warm without power and as you'll see my wood-burning cookstove a very good point so now we're gonna chat about the alternative heat sources now we I'm very picky about this because I feel very strongly that we should be putting the toxins into the air okay so carbon monoxide poisoning this most things that you burn are going to produce carbon monoxide some like alcohol will produce less not significantly less right than others but carbon monoxide poisoning is the other danger there are so many people when the power goes out that end up in the emergency room because of alternative heating or cooking things that they have done indoors that and it's just it's a very very dangerous condition if you look at this so carbon monoxide poisoning flu-like symptoms confusion dizziness irritability impaired judgment weakness nausea headache doesn't that sound like you every day right or me it sounds like me every day anyway and so sometimes it's really hard to know that carbon monoxide poisoning is what's going on you can just I'm not feeling well right and it is so very very dangerous so be really careful we want to make sure that we have smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in our home and make sure that we've checked those regularly that we've tested those regularly and we always recommend the carbon monoxide detectors with a digital readout most of the carbon monoxide detectors that are built into homes have a threshold they won't alarm until they get to that threshold and sometimes you have small amounts of carbon monoxide building up in your home yet may not trigger those alarms but if you have a digital readout like the one pictured here then you can keep an eye on that you can see that you've got some carbon monoxide levels building up and as we mentioned carbon monoxide is such a dangerous thing that you just really have to be aware if you've got it and take care of it now fire extinguishers this is actually the back of our garage door and it enters into the kit and because I have a little bit of an issue with being a bit of a pyro and and not always being wise and my decisions suspect how you would put it John yeah I think that's probably we we actually have these installed in our wall it's super easy to install these they just fit in between the studs and and really they are so easy to install but working carbon or working fire extinguishers are really really important knowing that this is there and that it's so easy to just something happens and we know right where it is it's easy easily to be seen our plans like our escape plans for our house are just tucked in behind there but it's just a really good way where you're not fumbling to find your fire extinguisher if you need it a fuel safety is storage we we really believe that it needs to be stored safely I was going to pick up my girls one day and this is actually the house that is right kitty corner from them from the house then and I thought it was my girls it was really quite a scary experience for me but this fire started in the garage and I don't remember all the reasons why but it seems to me that it had to do with some fuels that were stored into the in the garage so we want to be super careful because this is the last thing that you want to have happen when there's limited help to come so if you go to Google the Provident prepper how to store feel safely for emergencies and we have an entire post dedicated on how to the different fuels how to store them safely how to use them safely and these are a couple of our boys who obviously aren't always as safe as they should be they probably get that from their mother I think so yeah also we should mention that you need to make sure you're storing your fuels legally as well legally yes safely and legally because there are situations where your insurance company may not play pay a claim on your home if you have fuels in your garage or in your home they may just say you had fuels even if it didn't really have anything to do with what happened the fact that they were there main to get your insurance you may want to check your policy and and check on that but we always want to make sure we're storing fuel safely and legally yeah and think about your neighbor in in some of the classes that we teach I had one guy come up to me afterwards and you'd say you would be so proud of me I have 500 gallons of gasoline stored in my garage that is not a smart thing to do I would not encourage anyone to do anything like that and so so you put your fuel by your back fence but that's right by your neighbor be super careful what you do and where you store it the the best thing to do is store it in a building that you cannot or that you can't afford to have burned down like an out shed or something like that vented heaters for alternative heat sources whenever you have a choice it is best to have a vented device which is like a fireplace the chimney it's vented to the outside this is actually the vent that goes to our wood-burning stove so the toxins that are produced by our stove go outside and you can do that for other heaters too for kerosene heaters and things like that but that is always the first choice it's not always an option that everybody has but that is the safest way to burn in the house coal is actually a great fuel we have a neighbor who burns exclusively coal but it's getting harder and harder to find but it's stored in plastic lying pits or sheds or you can do it in boxes or barrels but it stores well in a dark place and you want it away from moving air and protect it from the weather and the Sun what this is my cute little guy helping John chop wood the wood is our main alternative fuel source it's we love it because we have a wood-burning stove and it's alternative or it's um renewable and we can store lots of it very very safely but one of the things that we want to make sure that we do is that we have all that wood split and ready to go so that see that axe and the dangerous things that can happen when you're splitting wood or chopping wood we want to make sure that we don't have any of those kinds of injuries occur when medical help is limited so make sure that at least we make sure that we have all of our wood split and ready to go in advance a newspaper bricks are lots okay when I first heard about this I thought that was so cool you know what it is a pain in the rear first of all there's not as much newspaper as there used to be but making these bricks takes a long time and a lot of energy and I found that although it's a great way to recycle it really isn't practical my opinion and it's kind of messy it was kind of a messy process um this is my friend's wood-burning stove which she loves this is they do not have any other type of heat source in their house ever this is all that they have and this keeps them warm all all winter long and it's it's just a beautiful device but what a great thing if you have the resources to be able to put one in your home in disaster strikes your power goes out all it takes is a little bit of wood and you can be really warm and I love that the kind of heat that the wood-burning stove produces it's very different it's very comforting and this is my wood-burning stove remember my traumatic experience with the experiment so when we build this house this was the first thing that was delivered to our house once it was the shell was completed because it was so important to me to have something to keep me warm this is not the most efficient stove that we could purchase but the reason why I liked it is because it has if you look it has an oven and over there to the right it has a water jacket so you put the water in there and you've constantly got hot water and that is being produced the pot that's on top that stove it's just awesome you just take this cast iron cookware and you can put it on top of there and it just kind of simmers it all day long when there's a fire makes the house smell really good um one time I did make applesauce so from very beginning I I cook the apples down on top of this and I process them in the water bath canner I did everything on this wood-burning stove and it was hard it was much harder than the other tools that I used but it was very comforting to know that if nothing else if I have nothing else but this stove and would that I could heat and cook well for my family so propane propane is a fantastic fuel it has an indefinite shelf life and it produces carbon dioxide when it burns it can produce carbon monoxide which is the bad stuff right carbon dioxide is the stuff you breathe out but carbon monoxide is the stuff that kills you so we want to make sure that we store it away from our home but it is heavier than air this is the bad thing about it and so it will just find a low lying spot and hang out there until there's some type of an ignition source and then it will explode so you have to be really careful with propane but it is a fantastic storage fuel and make sure that whatever you use if you're using anything indoors it must be rated for indoor use from a safety perspective yes absolutely and this is a heater that is rated for indoor use that I absolutely love so do you remember when I froze and got hypothermia because I took a nice shower with a wet head yeah well this buddy heater became my my buddy that last when we were able to use those alternative heat sources it was so nice then they make several different varieties but this is rated for indoor use and you can do two things with it if you look on this one there's a little green 1 pound propane canister attached but you can also have there's a propane hose that you can attach and you can attach it to a 20-pound propane tank that tank has to be outside the home outside like so we put it outside the window and we pull the propane hose into the house through the window let me close the window and tape it off so we're not losing losing the heat but that would last for a really really long time but this is my favourite portable choice now alcohol alcohol is fantastic to burn indoors because while it can produce some carbon monoxide it doesn't produce very much at all as long as it's a really pure form of alcohol we recommend denatured alcohol or Everclear we can use isopropyl but these are our two favorites if you look we've got three different cans that we're showing you it it shows up when you go to buy it there's all kinds of different ways that you can buy it it's some of these state that their alcohol stove fuel and then Emma the ingredients that says they're needing a charred alcohol but that's what you want to to use to burn indoors that or ever could ever clear is just more expensive but it is a fantastic fuel this is the heat pal 5100 and this is really cool and that picture earlier with the kids playing cards around the table you'll notice that it was on the table and because it has this cartridge right and you put the alcohol into the cartridge and then you place it into the the metal base and that keeps it up off of the table so that table had a tablecloth with a plastic cover on it and it didn't get it hot at all so it's really safe to put in different places then it has this top over it where it prevents anything from coming in contact with that open flame which makes it very relatively safe for indoor use the other thing that I really like about this is and can't quite tell in this picture but it also doubles as a cooker so once you put that cartridge back into the base there are some little metal wires that you can see Jonathan is holding the pot sits on top of those and so it's great it's a little bit pricey when you first buy it but doubling as a heater and a cooker lightweight portable that's just a fantastic option now this if you google the Provident prepper terracotta Keter cooker you will see this was kind of our little design so I started watching videos about people who use the candles and the terracotta pots as an alternative heat source and as I experimented with them I was just so disappointed and it was very dangerous I could see all kinds of ways that we could catch things on fire and create a situation worse than the one that we were in so after a whole bunch of experimentation we came up with this design and I am actually very very confident that it would be a great alternative for somebody who doesn't have much money and doesn't have much space so those sternos stoves they're just little folding camp stoves and they're designed for sterno heat or you can use the safe heat in it and if you read some of our other videos or other posts you'll know that we really like safety because that can we'll burn for six hours and it is clean to burn indoors some of the sterno flute fuels are not safe to burn indoors but the safe heat is just a great option so you can use it to cook with or you can put there's a smaller terracotta pot underneath the one that you can see and we put a little piece of aluminum foil over the hole and put the larger pot on top what you can't see in this photo is that temperature the little probe is inside the top of the terra cotta pot so that temperature 420 8.9 degrees that is how hot that safe heat is making that now this is not gonna warm an entire room but it does provide some nice radiant heat just from that location so as far as something to provide a heat source that can store the safe heat will store a good 10 years or so and it stores very very well it's very inexpensive what a great option kerosene kerosene is actually a really good storage fuel it can store for five years and you can extend that with fuel stabilizers and it requires very little oxygen to burn the problem with it is that it produces monoxide nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide when it burns so when I first started experimenting with this I thought oh grandma uses kerosene so I took my kerosene cooker and put it right on the kitchen counter it's amazing we're all alive anyway um and and I'm busy cooking and all of a sudden my little guy who's I don't know seven or eight who has asthma just started having huge issues and later after researching I thought this is terrible look what I have produced and put into my home for my family so I personally don't use kerosene indoors and I don't recommend the kerosene heaters because I have better alternatives if I didn't have another alternative that I might consider that but both the buddy heater the propane buddy heater and the alcohol heat pal 5,100 both of those devices are fantastic and philony and so I don't have to mess with the kerosene okay obviously in a power outage a generator is a great thing to have the things that we need to remember if you have a generators you've got to have fuel to run that generator and probably the most critical thing is you're not going to run that in your home in your garage or near a window that might be open you need that out away so that that exhaust is not getting into your home and creating a carbon monoxide hazard so obviously a generator is a great thing you just have to be very careful with it and you have to remember that in a crisis situation it may end up disappearing as others will hear it and decide they need it more than you do and one thing about the generator so alternative heating devices if you do have a generator while it's running it may be possible to to plug in a little electrical heater and so we do recommend that you have small portable electrical heaters because you never know what your situation is going to be right very very good that's another one you have okay so power out no problem you've got this these are some of our Google posts and and opportunities for you to get some more information the first one there is the Provident prepper heating action plan and I think this is critically important that you have some kind of a plan this is not just fly by the seat of your pants you need to have an action plan and review that with your family or others who may be living with you the next one there the Provident prepper best alternative heat sources to use during a power outage very very good information about how you can stay warm and the third one there the Provident prepper entered emergency heating recommended products and this gives you some of our best picks the things that we really like and you can look through those and see if those meet your needs so thank you thank you thank you make sure that you use your action plan go through it so that you won't be as bad as I was when I was freezing wow that was a lot of information we hope that you have learned some things but please go to our website at Provident prepper org and there is much much more you can learn and see there and for a question of the day have you ever survived an extended power outage what challenges did you face and how did you meet them comment below so that you can share your wisdom and expertise with our viewers and thanks again for being with us today please share this with your friends and neighbors so they too can be prepared when disaster strikes thanks for being part of the solution

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 355,470

Rating: 4.8340731 out of 5

Keywords: Emergency Preparedness, Emergency Heating, Alternative Heat Sources, Principles of Heat Loss, shtf, prepper, power outage

Id: JiG8hI2N0ac

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018