YouBet said:
So there is no way to recover? We are just screwed?
I've often thought that what we need to do is make our homes capable of handling losses of power.
There are a few things that can help:
Have an alternate source of heat for the winter time. This could be several choices. How about a heat pump with natural gas as a backup? Or firewood in wood burning stoves? (Chimneys seem to waste lots of energy.)
One possible choice for heat would be heating oil. Heating oil supposedly holds its energy a long time. I've read that it can last about 8 to 10 years. We probably wouldn't need to keep more than enough to last a week or two.
Remember that to burn heating oil, you spray it into the burner and that requires electricity. And then you need fans to blow it through the duct work unless you use radiators instead. You could do this with an emergency generator or maybe with a few solar panels -- enough to run the heating oil furnace in the daytime and to charge batteries to run overnight.
Or you could wrap up to stay warm. When I was a kid, I loved sleeping with the window open in the middle of the winter. My bedroom wasn't heated anyway. With four or five blankets, I stayed plenty warm enough. I sure hated to get out of bed in the morning, though. We had no plumbing upstairs so I didn't have to worry about freezing pipes.
Just make sure you have enough electricity to heat for your pipes and run it around the clock to keep the pipes from freezing. Or if your pipes run in the basement, just make sure that you can shut the water off in the basement and drain the pipes. In most places, the basement should remain above freezing without any problem.
