We loose power every so often in the winter. Sometimes for 6-12 hours.
While my furnace is gas, the electric being out means it doesn't work.
What options are there for getting heat in the house with the electric out?
I already have a gas fireplace which works when the power is out, but it doesn't heat the entire house so we have to sleep in that room. It also smells bad.
I've found this option;
I use a natural gas, gravity flow, wall furnace in a vacation home. It runs on natural gas alone. Absolutely NO electric to the furnace whatsoever.
The thermostat is controlled by a "millivolts" charge that are generated by the pilot light.
The one I use is installed in a wall, (between two studs), and provides heat into two rooms as heat is given off from the front and the rear panel. It is approximately 55,000 btus.
It is a "Cozy Wall Furnace" and manufactured by "Louisville Stove Co.".
They are relatively inexpensive and easy to install and best of all NO reliance on electricity.
Deep-cycle batteries and a power inverter to run the gas furnace and a few lights. Or a small generator for the same purpose.
You probaby have a gas stove in the kitchen, and they usually are not vented. Does the oven work without electricity (some do, some don't.) You can use the oven set to a moderate temperature (oven door closed!) to heat the kitchen and surrounding rooms.
Best regards, Bob
My niece has a vented gas stove/fireplace. It is an enclosed cast iron unit with a glass window in the front door. It easily heats her whole log home in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. It is her full-time heat. It runs without electric. When electric is on - it has a distribution fan that is not necessary. She has a big propane tank maybe 300 pounds - under her porch.
If your house is properly insulated, 6-12 hours without heat should not be all that noticable unless it's really really cold. I live in Baltimore and sometimes only use my furnace for maybe 45 minutes in the morning, even on the coldest days. And I have uninsulated walls.
Many floor and wall furnaces have flues, so you are not breathing flue gas. That means they are safe to run all night and you don't need to leave a window open for safety. How do you like living in a chimney. It is worth paying extra for safety and peace of mind.
Stretch
12 hours without heat is not a big deal. Even at 0 it should stay well above freezing. A kerosene heater will keep my 2800sf house about 20 degrees above outside indefinitely. A problem with long outages at zero, but fortunately that has never happened.
I also have a generator to run the refrigerator and furnace. But I don't bother to set anything up for a few hours. Most outages go away by then.
That seems like a pretty silly option. It just heats one room like your fireplace. A kerosene heater would probably work as well at one tenth the price.
Sure the house won't freeze, not until after the fire burns it all to the ground! Greg
I kept the kerosene heater going for a week with a battery powered CO detector next to it. No problem.
Yikes that is a lot of money. Others have suggested an inverter and a deep cycle battery. Get the specs on the motor and look into a UPS. Certainly should be less money than your solution.
Get a inverter (example see
There won't be enough power for your fan so remove the panel covers on the furnace to allow air from the furnace room to heat up and circulate by convection. The gas will ignite and shut off fairly quickly as the temperature sensor on the heat exchanger passes the "overheat" condition and shuts off the gas. When the heat exchanger cools somewhat the gas will ignite again. That is you will get short ON/OFF cycle times. Withoiut the fan the house will unlikely be as comfortably warm. But at least your house won't freeze up and burst the water pipes or kill the houseplants. If you are adventurous perhaps you can rig up an exercise bicycle to turn the furnace fan.
I can imagine the fan limit switch opening up -- with absoloutely no effect, and the burners keep going.
And the band played on....
Wow. Thanks for all the responses. I live in Missouri. We've had a few winters where we've lost electricity for 6-8 hours in a night, when it was very cold out. Around 0-10F. Long ago we had an outage in the winter that lasted half a week.
The house is 1500Sq. ft on one floor and around 1000 on another.
We have young kids and pets now. And some medicine that needs to be
60-80F that is life supporting.In the summer, the basement keeps cool enough. But we usually have power problems in the winter from the ice & snow storms.
I did some searches on some of these ideas. A whole house pellet stove might be a good answer for heat. I live in a neighborhood where storing wood wouldn't be a real option, but storing pellets in the basement near would be okay.
My stove is electric, so that will not work. The Gas Fireplace does just the one room, and doesn't keep it above 60f when it's around
0-10f, and smells. I don't think a UPS will work very well. It'd require a true-sine with some capacity. I'm wanting something that will last for at least a week. A power outage of 8 hours will be covered fine by the gas fireplace. So your talking about the same price for a UPS that will last several hours of actual runtime as a 8kVA generator that could last for as long as I can supply gas.I can't put a large gas tank outside due to the neighborhood I'm in. So I can hook a generator up to my NG line or use a gasoline powered version. If there is a natual disaster and the NG breaks, I'm without power. But the gas would require more work to keep it running if the NG line didn't break and it is likely louder.
Decisions.
Thank's for the feedback.
wood burning stove. i heat my entire 1000 sq ft house with it all winter. face cord of wood =55$
top posted cause i dont give a shit
You either have a very mild climate, or extreme insulation, or like living a
40 degrees. Here in New England a house that size would easily burn 3 or more full cords to heat.bottom posted because I care about proper flow of correspondence.
The limit switch is just that, a limit switch. It is a safety device, NOT an operating control. Pulling the plug on the fan, then running the gas heat using the limit as an operating control is just not safe. Safety controls are not designed to operate that often. Hopefully when it fails, it will be in the OPEN condition.
Stretch
Trust me I do HVAC for a living! A modern furnace is not designed to operate without a fan moving air trough it! Plus you want to jumper 120 volt to the gas controls, where specifically do you do this on the hundreds of different furnaces out there?? Look in a modern furnace. Everything runs to a circuit board. 120 volt goes in, power for the fan, burners, venter motor go out from the board, some 120 volt, some 24 volt.. Safeties such as a high limit are often connected to directly to the circuit board. Dumbest idea I have heard!! Anyone trying this will surely ruin pats of their furnace, if not just burn the house down!! A small portable generator for a few hundred dollars and then some method of disconnecting the power from the furnace, and reconnecting the furnace to a generator may much more sense! Even this is against code in most areas, but more practical. If it was me, I would have may furnace on a dedicated circuit, (required by code). With the furnace wired through a common outlet, that was secured in a small electrical box. When the power fails, power up the genny, pull the plug on the furnace, and plug it into the generator. Simple, safe, but yes, it is still against code! Greg
And how will that be possible? The gas burns and vents through the usual stack. The air inside the furnace heat exchanger heats up and circulates by convection through the ducts as normal. The burner will never stay on long enough or overheat as the overheat limit sensor will shut off the burner's gas. And it will cycle through this way and never get hot enough to burn down anything. Take a look at your gas furnace. The burner flame comes on for some time before the fan kicks in. That's when the lower limit switch kicks in to turn the furnace fan on to cool the heat exchanger. If no fan the heat exchanger temperature rises to the higher limit switch that will shut the burner off to prevent overheating the heat exchanger. In the above case the fan never comes on so upper limit is reached quickly and the burner shuts off. But you do get some heat from the time the burner was on. The colder the house is the longer the burner will stay lit until it reaches cut off temperature.
A more useful way will be to use a high capacity inverter, say over
1000 watts capacity. Connect the inverter direct to the car's battery. This way if you want the furnace to run with the fan motor run the car's engine so that there will be enough of a power feed to run the furnace. Of course you will have to have a set up to allow you to isolate the 120Vac supply so that the electrical feed from your car will not feed back into your house's electrical system..It's made the same smell for 6 years, since it was new. After it's been on for some time, the room smells gassy. You don't notice it if you stay in the room when the fireplace starts. However once you leave the room and then come back it is noticable.
The previous place I lived at ran off of propane, but it was a very large tank that powered hundreds of residences and was metered. How would I go about getting a small tank refilled? Just call the gas company?
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