10 Hacks To Stay Warm In Winter Blackouts

Welcome back survivalists. So Texas is currently being hit by a historic winter storm that has left millions without power for multiple days now and left to fend for themselves in freezing cold weather. So today I want to run through 10 hacks to keep you and your family warm when the power goes out. The hack number one is that you want to isolate yourself to one room within your house. So your best source of heat when the electricity goes out is going to be your own body and your goal is to just simply capture and try to keep as much of that heat near your body as you can. And one of the best ways to do this is to isolate yourself into one small area. So what you need to do is find one room in your home and designate that your shelter in place location and keep you and your family all in that one room so that you're capturing all of your body heat and keeping it in that one area. And there are a couple things that you want to consider when you're picking your shelter in place location. Preferably this is going to be a smaller room. It's going to be far easier for you to heat up a small room than it is going to be a larger room or especially your entire house. Ideally there won't be a lot of windows in this room either. Windows don't provide anywhere near as much insulation as an actual wall does and ideally you'd have a bathroom off of this room. So for a lot of people this may be a living room or may be a master bedroom that they want to isolate them and their families too and everybody shelter in place in that one location. If you have any dried food or emergency equipment bring all of that into your shelter in place location before you seal up all the doors and all the exits to this room. If this room has any hallways you want to do your best to cover up those hallways with sheets of plastics or blankets. And if this is your living room you have any stairwells you definitely want to cover those up as well because your body heat is going to want to rise up and it's all going to escape up a stairwell if you're in the lower level. We see a very similar concept to this when you go camping. If you're going camping by yourself and you have a very large five-person tent you're going to have a much harder time heating up that entire tent than if you only had a much smaller one-person tent. It's much less air that your body now has to heat up. So just by isolating everybody in your household to one room and then sealing up the entrances to that room that alone will make a few degree difference in the air temperature in that room compared to the rest of the house. So hack number two is that you can create your own hand warmers otherwise known as a thermal mass. So if the power to go out in my home right now in the middle of winter the very first thing that I would do is I would fill up all the containers I can with hot water. Your hot water heater probably has at least 80 gallons of scorching hot water and that water is actually going to stay very hot and very warm at least for the next 12 to 24 hours after you lose power because your hot water tank is so well insulated. So as soon as you lose power you want to fill up any thermoses or water bottles that you have with that hot water. Those water bottles will then radiate that heat for several hours after you fill them up and this is another technique that campers often use on cold nights. They'll fill up a thermos like this with hot water and then bring this into their sleeping bags at night to warm them up. If you that hot water and that heat will slowly dissipate over a few hours and you can also use the same technique with other objects as well. So let's say you have a barbecue grill in your backyard as soon as your power goes out you can turn that on and stick some rocks or some bricks or some metal some silverware pots and pans whatever you can in there allow them to absorb that heat and then bring those objects indoors with you and they will slowly radiate that heat for hours to come. My dad actually used to use this exact same technique for our dogs on cold winter nights. He used to have these big rocks they'd heat up on our fireplace and then you take them out and stick them in the dog houses outdoors and they would keep the dogs warm all night and a lot of times even when I come out the next morning there's still some warmth to these big rocks that we heated up. So if you have a barbecue outside or a propane burner or even just some candles heat up whatever you can any kind of metal objects or even rocks and bricks and then bring them indoors with you and they will slowly dissipate that heat. If all you have is some candles that's perfectly fine as well get some silverware get some spoons somehow lay them over top the candles so that they heat up you can then bring those spoons and silverware into your sleeping bag or into your bed with you and they will slowly release that heat over the night. So number three is to light candles even if all you have is some decorative candles use those those produce heat as well. Now admittedly the amount of heat that a single candle produces is not much and typically when that candle is in a large room and that heat quickly gets dissipated throughout that room is not a very significant difference but if you were to light one or two candles within a tent or within a car that is a small enough space that you would notice a difference in the temperature just from those candles. So if you and your family are isolating yourselves into one room having three four five candles going on at one time could make a significant difference in the air temperature in that room and you can also use that opportunity with the candle to create some sort of thermal mass by heating up some spoons or even some water with your candles. So the next hack is for you to seal up your windows so ideally you've already got double pane or triple pane windows and what these are is have two panes of glass and then you have argon gas in between them and that gas between the two panes of glass is actually acting as an insulator but truthfully down in Texas and a lot of other rural places where there's a lot of older homes there's still homeowners who only have single pane glass and those are terrible at providing insulation. The cold air on the outside will cool down that glass and you can literally feel the coldness radiating off that glass on the inside. So what you want to do is try to seal these windows up as best as you can especially if you have single pane windows that is probably going to be your biggest source of heat loss in your home. So simple technique is if you have any type of plastic such as shower curtains or a drop cloth for painting tape those up around the windows and that'll create an air gap between the plastic and the windows and that alone will provide some insulation. That coldness now has to go through the window and then through that insulating layer of air that you have before it gets into your home. Like that alone can have a big difference. Kind of a step up from that is you can tape up some blankets or sheets or even if you have some plywood you can literally just nail the plywood to the windows just to prevent any of that coldness from coming in. Windows are a huge source of heat loss in a home you want to do whatever you can to try to insulate these as best you can. Now I will say if these windows are facing south so they're getting direct sunlight in the winter you do want to make sure whatever you put up here is temporary so you can take that down later on or at least transparent so you're letting that sunlight into your home. So hack number five is to set up a tent within your shelter in place location. Like literally set this up in your bedroom and this is going to be where you and your family going to sleep. So like I said before the smaller the space that you can isolate you and your family to the easier you're going to have trying to heat that space up using your own body temperature. Just from going from you and your family spread out throughout your house to you guys all isolating in one room you're going to tell a difference in the temperature in that room. If you then further constrain yourselves all into one tent you're going to get pretty warm and cozy in that tent. If you have any sleeping bags get those out as well as those are also designed to keep your warmth inside. You can also grab any blankets and sheets you have and really make a thick layer within this tent you can either drape additional sheets and blankets over top of your tent just as long as they're not too heavy that they would break the tent rods. But do whatever you can to make a little cocoon and then have you and your family sleep inside this tent with all your blankets and sheets and there's a really good chance that you guys are going to get very warm within that tent. So the next hack is that you want to seal up any gaps within your house especially around the door. The one very simple technique that you should do immediately is get a towel roll it up and stick it along the base of your door. There's almost always a small gap on the base of most doors where just a little bit of cold air can come through but there's also going to be some gaps like that all around the sides and the top of the door as well. So get some tape and try to tape up those gaps as best you can even get some sheets if you want to and tape them around your doors. You can do the same thing with your windows a lot of times there's a little bit of a gap around windows as well. This is also true for any vents that you may have so in your bathroom you probably have a vent that goes up then goes out the back of your house and you may have a vent like that within your kitchen as well and again that's just we're allowing a lot of heat to escape out of that vent and a lot of cold air to come in through that vent. So really look at every single square inch of your house every door every window every vent do whatever you can to seal up all those gaps with tape with plastic with towels whatever you can. So hack number seven is if it gets really bad go sit in your car and crank the heat up. Now this is obviously not ideal but if you know that the temperature is going to drop down to 10 degrees in the middle of the night and you've got enough gas in your car go bring all your blankets and sleep in your car with that heat cranked up. Now obviously you don't want to do this with your car in the garage otherwise you're going to fall asleep and never wake up because of the carbon monoxide poisoning. So make sure your car is outdoors and if it is a bad snow storm make sure that your exhaust pipe is not covered by snow either. But just remember that you do have this as a last resort but if you brought all your pillows and blankets out to your car and even lit a candle or two within your car and cranked up the heat in an emergency you could get warmed up this way. So number eight is to use your car and an inverter and many cars actually come with a built-in inverter already in them and this allows you to plug in a 120 volt plug into an outlet in your car and run something usually power in your and a lot of RVs obviously have these inverters built into them as well and you can also simply buy an inverter and then connect it to your car and you're essentially using your car's engine as a generator to provide electricity to your home. Even if you only have one outlet that you can plug into that's enough to heat up a space heater or run an extension cord to a heated blanket or if you have nothing else run it to a light bulb. Many incandescent light bulbs put out quite a bit of heat especially Edison bulbs like these. These things get very very hot and even if you just had one of those running that could put out a pretty significant amount of heat. So hack number nine is to open up your blinds and your curtains to let the sunlight in to heat up your home. Now this is kind of a fine line because by doing that you are going to allow more cold air to radiate in but if you have direct sunlight coming in through those windows that is going to be a net positive. Most likely that sunlight is going to do more to heat up your room than taking away the curtains will do to cool down your room. So if you have direct sunlight in let that direct sunlight in and that will heat up your homes slightly. But if it's a cloudy ugly day and it's not any direct sunlight then I probably would close those back up. But especially at night when you don't have any sunlight coming in you want to make sure you close all of your blinds, close all of your curtains and even consider adding other layers of insulation such as plastic sheets or blankets. So number ten is a hack to prevent your pipes from freezing. So just because you have no power and you're freezing cold in your home your situation could get worse and that's by your pipes freezing and bursting and suddenly you have freezing cold water flowing into your living room from your ceiling. That would make your situation much much worse. So a quick hack to help prevent this is go to all of your faucets and turn them on just slightly so there's just a steady strip of water coming out of your faucets. The reason for this is that flowing water is far harder to freeze than still water. So even that slight movement through the pipes of your water will make a big difference in whether those pipes freeze and burst or not. So just allow a small drip of water to come down from all of your faucets and shower heads in your house. So now that you know how to keep yourself warm during a winter disaster to help prepare you for the next disaster check out this video I did right here breaking down the 11 items that FEMA wants all Americans to keep in their homes at all times. Don't forget to subscribe for more survival and prepping videos and hit that little bell icon to get notified every time I upload a new video. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you over in the next video.