What Do You Do For Heat After The Ice Storm?
by diywealth on Oct.25, 2009, under diy
A dramatic drop in normal temperature is forecast for the Northern region of the US. That scarcely seems like news but it does cause unease for what you can do to stay warm or to head off the pipes from freezing when the power goes down. An ice storm can hack down power lines and obstruct roads for days at a time. Even oil and gas heaters need air circulation fans to circulate heat around a house. Most also need the power grid to ignite the fuel. Depending on your particular circumstances and what part of the country you live in a Winter power outage can be anything from uncomfortable to disastrous.
Portable Coleman heater are a convenient and inexpensive way to keep a Winter power outage from turning into a nasty experience. Portable gas heaters come in several different sizes of heating capacity, so how do you resolve how many heaters you may need, and what sizes to get?
Here’s a speedy method for answering the question about what size portable heater you will want to have. Portable heaters are rated in BTU. To define how many BTU you need to heat an enclosed space to a reasonably warm temperature you must first calculate the volume of the room in cubic feet. The formula for volume is L x W x H. That’s the Length of the room x the Width x the Height to the ceiling. For instance, an 8×10 room with an 8 foot ceiling has a volume of 640 cubic feet (10 x 8 x 8).Next multiply the volume calculation of the room by what we’ll call an arbitrary ‘insulation factor.’ The normal interior room has an insulation factor of 2. A badly insulated room has an insulation factor of 4. So for our 8×10 room you would need a propane heater that was rated between 1,280 BTU and 2,560 BTU depending on your guess at the room insulation and how warm you wanted to heat it. If you just want to keep pipes from freezing then you could probably go with a factor of 1.
You can get propane in 1 lb. cylinders which are available almost everywhere and are easy to store. You can use the same propane cylinder to fuel a Coleman camping stove. If gasoline storage is not a problem a portable inverter gnerator would provide AC electricity for lights, TV and radio.
