IENACE

Unusually cold weather is forecast for the Northern region of the US. That hardly seems like news but it does cause concern for what you can do to stay comfortable or to keep the pipes from freezing when the power goes out. An ice storm can fell power lines and block roads for days at a time. Even oil and gas heaters need air circulation fans to circulate heat around a house. Most also need electrical power to ignite the fuel. Depending on your personal circumstances and what part of the country you live in a Winter power outage can be anything from discomfort to disastrous.

Portable propane heaters 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 heat output capability, so how do you pin down how many heaters you may need, and what sizes to get?

Here’s a handy method for answering the question about what size portable heater you may want. Portable heaters are rated in BTU. To determine how many BTU you need to heat an enclosed space to a livable 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 (8×10x8).After you get volume multiply the volume calculation of the room by what we’ll call an arbitrary ‘insulation factor.’ A very well insulated 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 portable gas heater that was rated between 1,280 BTU and 2,560 BTU depending on your estimate of the insulation factor 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 grill stove. If gasoline storage is not a problem a small portable generator would provide AC electricity for lights, TV and radio.