Get the House and the Truck Ready Before the Ice Comes

Your gas furnace needs electricity. The burner runs on gas, sure, but the blower motor, the ignition and the thermostat all run on house current. Kill the power and that beautiful 96-percent-efficient unit in the basement becomes a large metal box. People find this out at 2 a.m. in January, which is a rough time to learn anything.

So start there. Not with a generator, not with a pallet of freeze-dried stroganoff. Start with the question of how your family stays warm for 48 hours with no electricity, and work outward from the answer.

Know what the forecast is actually telling you

The National Weather Service uses three words that mean three different things, and most people treat them as one.

A winter storm watch means conditions are favorable. Usually issued a day or two out. That's your shopping window.

A winter storm warning means it's happening or about to. Travel gets dangerous.

An ice storm warning is the one to respect. Freezing rain brings down limbs and power lines, and ice outages last longer than snow outages because crews can't climb into a tree that's still shedding branches. Snow you shovel. Ice you wait out.

Set your phone to receive Wireless Emergency Alerts and pull the NWS forecast for your actual county, not the regional number on the evening news. A 20-mile difference in the rain-snow line changes everything about your week.

The heat plan, in order of what to do first

Check your carbon monoxide alarms tonight. Press the test button. Replace the batteries. If the unit is more than seven to ten years old, look at the date stamped on the back and replace the whole thing. CO sensors wear out even when the alarm still chirps. This is the single highest-value ten minutes in this entire article, because every other heat backup on this list produces exhaust.

Then figure out your fallback:

• Wood stove or fireplace with a working damper. Get the chimney inspected before you lean on it. A creosote fire during an ice storm is a bad day compounding itself.
• Propane or kerosene space heater rated for indoor use. Read the label. If it doesn't say indoor use, it isn't. Crack a window, keep it away from curtains and furniture, never leave it running while you sleep.
• No combustion at all. Close off one room, preferably a small interior one, hang a blanket over the doorway, and put everybody in it with sleeping bags. Bodies plus a small room holds heat surprisingly well. Cold-rated sleeping bags are cheaper than a generator and they never fail to start.

Never heat a house with the oven, the range or a charcoal grill. Not in the garage, not on the porch with the door open. That's how people die in outages, and it's always the same story.

If you run a generator, run it 20 feet away

The Consumer Product Safety Commission's guidance is blunt: portable generators go outside, at least 20 feet from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from doors, windows and vents. Not in the garage. Not in the garage with the door up. Not on the covered patio.

Two more things the manual buries. First, gas goes stale. If your generator has been sitting since last winter with untreated fuel in the carburetor, it may not start, and you'll be pulling a cord in sleet while your hands go numb. Run it for 15 minutes every few months and store fuel with stabilizer. Second, a generator with no cords is a paperweight. You want heavy-gauge outdoor extension cords sized for what you're plugging in.

And the honest counterpoint: for a lot of households, a 5,000-watt generator is the wrong purchase. If your outages run six hours twice a winter, a decent battery power station plus good sleeping bags plus a full pantry solves the problem with no fuel, no maintenance and no exhaust risk. Buy the generator when you have a medical device, a well pump or a sump pump that genuinely can't go dark.

Water, food and the 4-and-48 rule

If you're on a well, no power means no water. If you're on city water, you're probably fine unless the pumping station loses power too. Either way, fill the bathtub when a warning goes up. Store a gallon per person per day for three days, minimum, and don't forget the dog.

Food safety has clean numbers worth memorizing. A closed refrigerator keeps food safe about four hours. A full freezer holds about 48 hours; half full, about 24. The key word is closed. Every time somebody opens the door to stare thoughtfully at the contents, you spend part of that budget. Put an appliance thermometer in the freezer so you can tell what happened while you were asleep. Above 40 degrees for more than two hours, throw it out. When in doubt, throw it out.

Plan two days of food that requires zero cooking. Peanut butter, tortillas, canned chili you'd eat cold, tuna, oatmeal you can make with hot water off a camp stove outdoors.

Pipes are the expensive failure

A burst supply line will cost you more than every other item in this article combined.

Before the cold snap: disconnect garden hoses, shut off and drain the outdoor spigots, and know where your main water shutoff is. Actually go look at it. Turn the valve to make sure it isn't seized. If it's a gate valve that hasn't moved since 1997, that's a plumber call to make in October, not in a flooded basement in February.

During the snap: open the cabinet doors under kitchen and bathroom sinks so warm air reaches the pipes on exterior walls, and let a pencil-thin stream of cold water run from the faucet farthest from your main. Moving water resists freezing. The extra couple dollars on the water bill isn't a real argument.

If a faucet goes dry in a cold house, you probably have a freeze starting. Shut off the main and warm the pipe with a hair dryer, working from the faucet back. No torches, ever.

The truck

Keep the tank above half. Tire pressure drops roughly one psi for every 10 degrees the temperature falls, so the tires you set in September are soft in January. Check them cold, in the morning, before you drive.

In the vehicle, all winter:

• Wool blanket or an old sleeping bag, plus hat and gloves you don't mind leaving in the truck
• Jumper cables or a lithium jump pack, charged
• Small folding shovel and a bag of sand or cat litter for traction
• Ice scraper with a brush, and a second one so the passenger can work
• Headlamp with fresh batteries, flares or reflective triangles
• Water, granola bars, and any medication you'd miss over a long night
• A phone battery bank, because your car charger is useless if the engine won't run

Clear the whole car before you drive. The roof too. The slab of snow that slides off your roof at 45 mph goes straight onto the windshield of the driver behind you.

If you slide off and get stuck

Stay with the vehicle. It's shelter, and it's far easier for a plow or a trooper to spot than a man walking a ditch line. Call 911 and give them a mile marker or cross street.

Then get out once, carefully, and clear snow away from the tailpipe. A blocked exhaust pushes carbon monoxide into the cabin. Run the engine about ten minutes an hour for heat, with a downwind window cracked an inch. Tie something bright to the antenna or the door handle. Move your hands and feet to keep circulation up. Leave the dome light on at night while the engine runs.

The whole plan takes one Saturday. Batteries in the CO alarms, hoses off the spigots, sand in the truck bed, sleeping bags out of the attic and into the hall closet where you can find them in the dark. Do it before the forecast gives you a reason to, because the hardware store on watch day is a picked-over aisle and a long line, and everybody in it's wishing they'd gone last week.