I have a friend who lives up in the mountains where it actually snows part of the year. If she looses power in the winter, all she has to do is put the frozen foods outside in a wooden or metal chest to keep them from going bad. She also has a wood stove in the living room that her and her husband use to heat the house when needed. Summer time is a bit more difficult of a time for power outages.

The most important thing I’ve learned over the years is to work with nature, not against it. If you’ve got a cold enough climate to freeze meat outside the house, then you don’t have to worry about the refrigerator going down. Remember that the Inuit store their meat in un-insulated shacks and let nature do the freezing. They just have to keep the polar bears out of it, so they build them on stilts and climb a ladder to get to their pantry.

If keeping warm is a concern in winter, again I’d say look to past civilizations for the answer. People have figured out ingenious ways to stay comfy in cold weather without electricity and with a minimum of fuel needed. Thick cob or rammed earth walls, straw bale homes, a properly built log cabin…….it’s all about the insulation factor. I was watchin’ a show not to long ago that barrowed a technique from the ancient romans and muslims. Before the house was built, the contractor dug down below the frost line and layed a network of pipes in the foundation and covered it over. When the home was built, they tied a heat exchange system into that network of pipes. Now here’s the fun, an anti-freeze type fluid is circulated through those pipes. In the winter, below the frost line the earth remains at a constant temperature that is warmer than the outside air. The liquid in the pipe warms the house through the heat exchange system. In the Summer, the ground is cooler than the outside air, and the system acts like a heat sink drawing heat out of the house and into the ground. The only difference between the modern and ancient system is the ancient system was a system of air ducts instead of fluid filled pipes. And water conducts here many times faster than air does.

See, this is why I love history, archeaology, and anthropology. Ancient peoples have a lot to teach us.

Sage

In the north country, we tend to focus on how to keep things from freezing solid (including ourselves). I have come across multi-fuel refrigerators in my reading, but they seem to be undersized and expensive. I haven’t given much thought to super-insulated appliances refridgerators/freezers. So long as air flow isn’t impeded across the coils . . . I would think a lot could be done with built-ins. I wonder what the commercial offerings are.

The last time the power went out, we just got out the camping gear and lit the hurricane lamp and candle lanterns. But it was the food in the refrigerator we worried about loosing the most. That’s really when I started thinking about alternative power sources.

Sage

>Never ever run a camp stove inside no matter
>what the kind of fuel. The majority of deaths
>from Ike in the South land was from carbon
>monoxide poisoning.

I’ll have to look for those numbers. That’s an education issue and a sad state of affairs. My heart goes out to the families involved!

Given the divergent fuel sources required by off-peak heating, we’re replacing the CO detector battery (along with our smoke detector batteries) every year and are at least peripherally aware of potential problems that way.

Happily, in regard specifically to “camping” type appliances, that’s no place we have to go unless it is truly an emergency.

If the phone system is still operational, a corded phone will work. A
wireless phone will not work without power. A cell phone will work until the batteries run down.

For water, store water in gallon jugs and rotate it on a regular basis, if nothing else, you can use it to flush the toilet.

Emergencies in Alaska in the winter can be life threatening. We loose our water and the heat tape that keeps the well operational. We do have a wood stove but that won’t keep the water lines from freezing in an extended outage. We have a satelite internet system and the modem will operate on a 12 volt system as will the laptop. I am also a ham operator so have communications thru that.

This is a good time to look at your preparations for emergencies and make the changes that you might need for your household.

>It is amazingly annoying to not have the internet
>or water available at the tap of a button or turning
>of a faucet

Without a doubt. Happily, our ISP still maintains a modem pool. In the event we lose our broadband- we fire up the old laptop and we’re back in business. It’s annoyingly slow by comparison . . . but it gets the job done!