Heat When the Power's Out

Oct 31, 2026 · preparedness

When the power goes out in summer, it’s a bother. Fans stop, food starts warming up, everybody’s uncomfortable. When it goes out in winter, it’s a different thing altogether. Winter does not play around, and the cold inside your house can turn into the real problem, faster than most folks expect.

Our kind of winter trouble here is ice. Ice coats the lines, limbs come down, and crews can’t get to the work till the roads clear. That can mean days, not hours. So the question worth answering now, on a warm evening, is a plain one: if the heat stops tonight, how does your family stay warm?

The first answer is small on purpose. Don’t try to heat the whole house. Pick one room, the one with the fewest outside walls and windows, and make that the warm room. Close the doors to the rest of the house. Hang a blanket over doorways that won’t close. Roll towels up tight against the cracks under doors. Everybody lives in that one room till the power comes back: sleeping, eating, all of it. One small room holds heat. A whole house just loses it.

Dress like you mean it. Layers work better than one heavy coat: a base layer, then loose layers over it, then a hat and warm socks. A whole lot of your heat walks off through your head and your feet, and a stocking cap inside the house ain’t silly in a cold snap, it’s smart. At night, pile on the blankets, get in sleeping bags if you’ve got them, and let the little ones sleep between the grown folks. Ecclesiastes 4:11 says if two lie down together they’ll keep warm, and anybody who’s camped in the cold can tell you that’s just true.

Now let’s talk about heat itself, because this is where folks get hurt. Every winter, people die after storms from carbon monoxide, and it kills quiet. You can’t see it and you can’t smell it. So hear this part plain: never run a generator inside the house or in a garage, not even with the door cracked. Never grill indoors. Never heat with a gas oven. A generator belongs outside, well away from the house and away from open windows. And a battery powered carbon monoxide alarm is worth every dime, because it’s the only nose that works for that gas.

If you’ve got a fireplace or a wood stove, that warm room ought to be the room it’s in, and the wood ought to be cut and dry before the storm, not during it. If you’ve got a propane or kerosene heater made for indoor use, follow what the maker says word for word, crack a window the way it calls for, and never leave it running while everybody sleeps unless it’s built for that.

Eat and drink, too. A body makes heat out of food, and warm drinks help more than you’d think. Folks forget to drink water in cold weather, and that makes everything worse, so keep the water close and keep sipping.

And check on your people. The older folks down the road, the neighbor who lives alone: cold finds them first. A knock on the door and an invite into your warm room might be the most important prep you ever made. That’s not just being ready, y’all. That’s being a neighbor.

The power will come back. It always does. The goal is just to still be warm, safe, and in good shape when it does, with a house that came through fine because you had a plan before the ice ever showed up.