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Saturday, August 9, 2014

It’s August — Time to Prep Your Home to Heat Off-the-Grid this Winter

For a Few Hundred Dollars, Any US Home Can be Ready to Battle Winter’s Cold Off the Grid


by PTS, SGT Report:


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There is something called the “Rule of Threes ” in determining how long a person can survive in various scenarios. The typical human being can live for


3 Minutes without Air

3 Hours (in sub-Z temps) without Heat

3 Days without Water, or

3 Weeks without Food

Granted none of those events sound all that much fun, which is exactly why we accumulate and store items to prevent those situations from happening to us.


Personally, I’ve always felt that I was somewhat lacking in the first 2 of those 4 areas. As an SGT Report reader, there is a good chance that like me, you’ve already got a good amount of food squirreled away, you have some emergency water, hopefully even a water filter (I own the Lifestraw Family Filter as well as a second as backup — I LOVE the idea of having the ability of providing clean water for 3 years at a very reasonable price), and of course, plenty of lead in addition to you favorite firearms to deliver the said lead to any perps who would want to harm your family.


I’m not sure how much I can do to be prepared for a sustained lack of breathable air. Purchasing gas masks for the entire family and storing a bunch of oxygen tanks seems a bit over the top to me. If I’d ever find myself without air, that probably means that it’s my time to leave this life, so I’m not going to spend a whole lot of energy worrying about that situation.


However, the heat and shelter aspect of survival in a SHTF situation was always one in which I have felt woefully inadequate…that is until now.



If you live in a cold weather climate like I do, it makes sense to have the ability to acquire heat in a grid-down situation. While I don’t claim to be an expert in this, if you’d care to join me I will take you on the heat-finding odyssey which I have been engaged in over the past couple years, and perhaps you will pick up some tips and ideas to shield yourself from winter’s cold if you would happen to lose access to electricity and gas.


First, a couple false starts. More accurately, I will call one a bad purchase and the other a useful item only in the short term. My first venture into the emergency heating world was to purchase a Coleman SportCat Propane Heater. — Wow…what a colossal waste of money! I still own the unit; I like its portability and ease of use, but it puts out such an infinitesimal amount of heat that it’s pretty much only good for warming your hands. The Coleman Heater isn’t going to make even the tiniest dent in raising the temperature of the smallest of rooms. Far more practical was the Mr. Heater Portable Buddy (as well as other models in the Mr. Heater family). It goes through the 1 Pound propane tanks far quicker than the Coleman Heater, but it does produce a serviceable amount of heat. One or two of these could help warm selected rooms of a house for several days in the event that power is lost, but this isn’t a long-term, or even a medium-term solution.


Enter the Yukon Stove M1950. Now these suckers ARE admittedly difficult to find (having been originally manufactured for use in the Korean War), so maybe you want to consider the same concept just with a different stove (one example is the Hunter Space Heater Arctic , a more modern stove but the same basic idea). I can’t speak for the Hunter Heater, but as far as the Yukon, it’s rugged, it’s small, it PUTS OUT HEAT, and it will cost you under $200, again, assuming you can find one at an Army-Navy Surplus Store or on eBay.


B4INREMOTE-aHR0cDovL3NndHJlcG9ydC5jb20vd3AtY29udGVudC91cGxvYWRzLzIwMTQvMDgvSU1HLTIwMTQwODA5LTAwMzEzLmpwZw== My house has a woodburning fireplace, but one that is a fairly light-weight, decorative unit. During the winter, I light fires more for ambiance than anything else. In order for it to make a noticeable difference in the home’s internal temperature, I have to burn a crazy amount of wood. Also, I don’t know what the percentage is, I lose a great deal of the heat as it escapes straight up the chimney. But, in my situation, I can insert the Yukon Stove into the fireplace perpendicularly. Just the first chimney extension of the Yukon suffices to vent the smoke up my home’s chimney. This takes 2 minutes for me to set-up and start lighting. My fireplace and hearth are positioned in such a way that the back end (the chimney end) is very slightly raised in relation to the front end, meaning that the smoke naturally wants to vent toward the back of the stove and up the chimney. Burning the Yukon Stove in my fireplace allows me to use much less wood but harness far more of the BTUs…just imagine a hot, metal box radiating heat from your living room.


On that note let’s talk about Safety quickly. The two most obvious dangers are fire-hazard and carbon-monoxide poisoning. I would always have a battery-operated carbon monoxide detector in the vicinity of this set-up, just in case something is going awry. Obviously anything flammable (furniture, carpet, unprotected walls) needs to be far away from this. If you have small children and pets like I do, there needs to be a way to block this off from them. Though I could conceivably operate this stove daily during the winter to drastically cut down on my heating bill, I intend to use my Yukon Stove set-up only in an emergency.


But what if you do not have a fireplace? You’ll need two things: the ability to vent the exhaust, as well as a safe area to position the stove, where its tremendous heat will not present a fire hazard to nearby objects. This video from fencekid is the most helpful one I’ve found on YouTube to explain how to set up a Yukon Stove in a house which lacks a fireplace…and by the way, I’m NOT fencekid, I don’t know him, so please direct any questions you have about what he did to him : )


Finally, we should cover Fuel. I stack wood, so I could use that. The Yukon Stove is designed to use multiple types of fuel, from gasoline to kerosene to pretty much anything else that burns. I plan on keeping it simple and using solid fuel. I don’t like the idea of having a 5-Gallon Jerry Can filled with kerosene in my living room positioned in close proximity to the fireplace. As fencekid demonstrated in the above video, this stove is equipped to burn coal. While coal has the benefit of being super easy to store, it is not extremely easy to find these days, at least at a reasonable price. The two most common types of coal are Bituminous and Anthracite . Bituminous is easier to light, but burns cooler (but still a heck of a lot hotter than wood). Anthracite burns hotter, but requires something like a blowtorch to ignite. I prefer to mix the two, getting the Bituminous started over a bed of charcoal, and then mixing in the Anthracite as the fire is up and going. But where to get it? You can’t just run to Wal-Mart or Home Depot and pick up a few hundred pounds of coal. It’s available online…you can find people selling it on eBay at about a dollar per pound. Honestly, that price per pound is pretty steep. However, realize that people selling this over the internet must pay quite a few bucks to ship these bulky boxes to you. So much of the cost of purchasing coal this way goes not to the seller, but to the Post Office and/or to FeeBay/PayPal. But while over-paying for coal is better than having no coal at all, hopefully you can find someone in your area who has coal for Ten Times LESS than the going eBay rate. In the right area, it is not difficult to locate coal for LESS THAN 10 cents a pound. You ought to be able to find a ton of coal for sale for around $200, or even less. That’s a LOT of BTUs for not very much cash. It is easily stored in your garage, shed, or in my case, behind my woodpile. It might involve you driving several hours to get it, but in my mind that is a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing that you have your heat prep covered.


And that’s what this is all about: peace of mind. Maybe my stove and my coal will sit in storage for a year, a decade, or as long as I’m around. If I never end up using this set-up, I’m more than cool with that! Listen, there’s a ton of things I cannot control in this world. But I am happy that I can and have done something to make sure that in an emergency event lasting weeks or even months, for just a few hundred dollars there is a reliable source of heat for my home and my family.


Stay Warm!


Peter






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