Stuff Your Boss

Unusually cold weather is forecast for the Northern half of the US. That scarcely seems like news but it does cause anxiety for what you can do to stay tepid or to head off the pipes from freezing when the power goes out. An ice storm can hack down power lines and barricade roads for days at a time. Unfortunately oil and gas heaters need air circulation fans to move heat around a house. Most also need electrical power to ignite the fuel. Depending on your own circumstances and where you live a Winter power outage can be anything from discomfort to disastrous.

Portable Coleman heater are a cheap and convenient 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 need. Portable heaters are rated in BTU. To define how many BTU you need to heat an enclosed space to a functioning 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. As an example, an 8×10 room with an 8 foot ceiling has a volume of 640 cubic feet (10 x 8 x 8).After you get volume multiply the volume calculation of the room by what we’ll call an arbitrary ‘insulation factor.’ A 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 propane heater that was rated between 1,280 BTU and 2,560 BTU depending on how well you thought the room was insulated 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 pound cylinders which are available almost everywhere and are easy to store. You can use the same propane cylinder to fuel a Coleman camping stove. If gasoline storage is not a problem a portable inverter gnerator would provide AC electricity for lights, TV and radio.

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