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| You are Here: Home / The UnImaginable |
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Help Prepare Your Family For
A Hurricane, Ice Storm, Flood... |
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How to heat your home
Get a large, high quality, convection-type kerosene heater, spare wicks, and lots of fuel immediately. Propane heaters can give off deadly carbon monoxide gas and are not recommended for indoor use. Propane gas is highly explosive; kerosene isn't. A kerosene heater I like (having seen no others; I tend to make up my mind quickly, and repent at my leisure) is one made by a Toyota affiliate, the Kero-sun. It meets or exceeds the stringent requirements of CSA testing and certification, has some rather nifty safety features, and emission levels are low. This is a fuel-burning appliance, and you'd be dead-wrong not to read the operating instructions of anything that affects the air that you breathe. With one you can heat about 350 to 600 square feet of living space. The price is in the $300 to $450 range, depending on the model.
Get extra wicks. In Canada, Home Hardware carries this heater, plus large containers of low-odour kerosene fuel. The fuel sells for about $27 for 19 litres (approx. $US16 for 5 gallons) which will power a heater for about 80 hours, or half a week.
How much fuel?
Err on the side of caution. ("About 8% of the Y2K problems will occur in the first two weeks," say the consultants, the Gartner Group.) Once the power comes back on, presume that it will go off again! And again! If the power stays out, Spring will be a long time coming.
A wood-burning fireplace is beautiful to watch, but if there are no glass doors it will draw heat out of a room. A fireplace insert, especially one you can cook on, is helpful but without power its fan won't work and its ability to warm a room is thereby limited. Get at least a cord of wood for your fireplace, and store it inside your home.
Best types of firewood: oak, beech, sugar maple, yellow birch; moderately good: other maples, tamarack, pine, other birches; poor: hemlock, red spruce, poplar, balsam fir, white pine. The poorest have about half the heating value of the best.
Which kind of cooking stove should you get?
Propane stoves can be dangerous if improperly connected. Coleman stoves come in 2 types: naphtha and propane. Either can do the job but require ventilation. Apparently the naphtha ones are better on a cost-per-hour basis but people choose propane over naphtha about 4 to 1, because of propane's convenience. Estimate your fuel needs then double it. Barbecues produce deadly carbon monoxide gas and are never to be used indoors.
Wick-type stoves-in-a-can are available in sporting goods stores. Here's how you can use them to cook on your kitchen stove: support an oven rack with bricks and place 1 or 2 wick-type stoves under the rack. Buy your stoves and fuel immediately. Purchase lots of matches or lighters. Buy some for your neighbours! Always presume that a dangerous gas (one that you can't see or smell) is being given off. Keep your room ventilated. Get a carbon monoxide detector, one that also works from a back-up battery.
Get lots of spare batteries for it and for your smoke detectors. Many deaths during the Ice Storm resulted from fire, hypothermia, and carbon monoxide poisoning. Check that your neighbours have some detectors and batteries. If they don't, buy some for them, so a fire in their home won't burn down yours too.
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