Electric furnace?

[Ed Pawlowski]

When the power goes out, most every type of residential heat will be out. Electricity is used for controls , blowers, circulators, oil burnerw. Wood and coal make good backup.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I used to know a man who lived in an oil field. At one time landowners got free gas. When that changed he got a heat pump. One thing he didn't know was that when the temperature gets low, a heat pump loses efficiency. That backup electric heat was expensive.

BTW, this is near New London TX where in 1937 a school exploded because of free (non-odorized) natural gas.

[Cindy Hamilton]

60 F? Good grief! It was 60 F and windy yesterday, yet my house was 73 F due to the waste heat from the fridge and television. I had to open the windows to cool the house down.

Cindy Hamilton

[Robert Green]

More likely the whole house had stored a fair amount of heat and was "heat-soaked" (learned that from my NASA geek friends - they routinely "cold-soak" potential spacecraft to chill them down completely to temperature levels that they would encounter. Lots and lots of very common and frequently used construction and electronic items just go to pieces at very low temps.

If the house is closed up and it's sunny, there's a solar boost. Even humidity gets stored up and the indoor humidity always lags the outdoor one, at least around here, by several days. Wood, cloth, carpets and lots of other material absorbs moisture.

The best example I can give for homes being "cold-soaked" is how long it takes for the bed and lots of other items to come up to room temperature. The air is warm, but the house and its contents are not. I had a furnace fail when I was away once and the house was close to freezing. The warmest part of the house, ironically, was the basement where most of the copper piping was. I had to get the electric blanket out because the bed kept sucking the heat out of me.

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Ed Pawlowski:

We have nat gas. During power failures, the house (including furnace blower) pulls 800-1200 watts in "Lifeboat" mode and a 2 KW gennie covers that nicely.

[trader_4]

I think his point was that with gas, oil, etc, a small generator can be used to run the blower and controls. With an electric furnace, not so much.

[Ralph Mowery]

I just picked a temperature that suited me. With no electricity , there will be no TV and fridge to make heat. Not sure how long it would take to get a house from 70 or so down to 60 with out anthing to make heat.

While 60 deg is fine for some, I don't like to be cold and I am cold natured. We keep the house at 72 in the winter and 74 in the summer.

Due to allageries the windows stay closed here. I have lived in this house for 10 years and one window was opened once by a man to put a new rug in the bedroom. He wanted to go in the window with the rug as he said it would be easier for him to do that.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Maybe, but an alternate fuel can still be a good backup. Kerosene and propane heaters can be handy too. Sometimes generators don't start.

[trader_4]

Like someone else pointed out, it's actually the sun that's warming the house, not the TV and fridge. Fridge today is under 100W, TV, IDK, maybe 150W for a big one? Really insignificant heat for a home.

[Vic Smith]

My total backup plan for winter electricity outages is two of these. And currently about 4 gallons of kerosene. Should get more.

For outages when it's not freezing, I just suffer it. Multi-day outage only happened once.

[clare]

Natural gas generator capable of producing 5000 watts all day - no fuel to store - will run the natural gas furnace, and even run one element of the kitchen stove to cook on.

[HerHusband]

We had a central electric furnace in our old house. One year in the middle of a cold winter, the furnace broke. No one had the part locally, and it took two weeks to special order a replacement. We struggled to stay warm and keep the pipes from freezing using a couple of small space heaters.

From that experience I learned not to put all my eggs in one basket. In our current home we have electric wall heaters. Each room can be heated individually. If one breaks, we still have heaters in several other rooms we can use.

If the power goes out completely, we have a woodstove. It easily heats the entire house, we can cook on it if needed, and we can boil a pan of water for bathing purposes. It even provides a bit of light.

I also have a small butane powered stove with several canisters of butane I can use for cooking if needed.

Around here, power outages usually happen during the winter. Food will generally stay cold in the refrigerator for almost a day. After that we have been known to bag up the food and stick it outside where it's colder anyway.

I have a wide assortment of battery powered lighting and battery backup for the computer and other devices.

Our biggest weakness during a power outage is water. We are on a well so the pump stops running when the power goes out. If it times out right, we may have 200+ gallons of water in the pressure tank. Usually the tank is closer to empty when the power shuts off. So, I store about 20 gallons of water in jugs for emergency needs.

We can easily get by for a few days. Beyond that we'll need to replenish our food supplies anyway.

The longest outage we have had in 30+ years was two days.

Anthony Watson

[Mark Lloyd]

Here, there ave been 3 multi-day outages. that's about 1 every 8 years.

The first was an ice storm in 1999. I had just moved and the outage was when I found I had gas logs (old and completely non-electric).

The second was Hurricane Ike (about 2007) in the fall when the weather was good (at least after the wind stopped).

The third was a tornado this May. It wasn't summer yet but it was still hot. I got a generator in 2007 and it could run a window AC. It'd be enough for the natural gas furnace if it was cold.

OT: Tomorrow I put out Halloween decorations.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Here, long (more than a couple of hours) outages seem to happen every 8 years. However, only 1 of the last 3 have been in the winter.

As I said in another post, I was glad to have the gas logs (gas water heater too).

[Shade Tree Guy]

Last two outages (rare around here) The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, several hours but I had a small plug-in-the-car TV set to watch the local news. A year or two ago, a car took out a telephone pole. Got the gas powered generator started when the electricity came back on

[Muggles]

We've had several episodes of the power going out for days at a time here. One ice storm nearly closed down the entire city. Most power lines are above ground here, so trees dropped a lot of ice laden branches and lots of people were without power. Ours was out for 10 days, but others were 2 weeks or more.

We have a couple of generators and enough extension chords to get about

90% powered up. By the time the power came back on we were so used to using the generators it was almost a bit of culture shock to not have to use them again.

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Ed Pawlowski:

Guy I know has one of those fancy-schamcy pad-mounted gennies with automatic start/cutover - fed by a huge propane tank.

Every so often it starts itself up for a systems check.

When we had last year's 9-day electric outage, it turned out that all those systems checks had burned out the alternator and he was without the gennie until the outage was over and a repair guy came out.

After hearing that, I got a second 2KW gennie.... now I have two... and, besides it being nice to be able to make coffee or run the big microwave, the real purpose of it is redundancy.

I keep them in the garden shed and start them up for a few minutes every month or so .... or whenever I think of it.

[gfretwell]

We had a friend who was out at the end of a dead end street after Charley and they lived on a generator for months. They say the problem was "feeding the monster". Sometimes fuel is hard to come by and even then you are hauling a lot of it.

[RealPerson]

Look at all the heat coming out of a modern computer. Some of these new multicore computers have 4 or 5 fans in them because of the excessive heat they produce. The older computers from the early 2000's and prior were low powered, but not anymore. If you can live with an older computer, running Windows XP or an earlier operating system, you can save a lot of power. But these newer operating systems cant run on that older hardware.

I had a friend call me because her computer would turn itself off after

10 minutes or less. It was a multicore Dell machine. The CPU fan and Power supply fan both worked, but the larger fan on the back of the case had died. It was darn near hot enough at that CPU heatsink to fry an egg. Because a replacement fan had to be ordered, I rigged up a window fan and some cardboard to divert the air thru the computer, and told her to make sure that fan is running if she needed to use the computer, and to turn off the computer as soon as she is finished. It worked fine until the replacement fan arrived in the mail a week later.

I never leave on my newer computer in hot weather, but I dont worry much about using my old early 2000's single core machine with XP.

[notbob]

I need to move up to a new computer, but was not aware of the heat probs you mention. My ancient P4 box doesn't even leave the PS fan running during use, only during boot up. I thought the newer CPUs were similar, but you say multi cores need mucho cooking. Zat include i5's and i7's?

Thnx. I'll keep this info in mind.

nb