Portable Propane Heaters For Winter Storms
A dramatic drop in normal temperature is forecast for the Northern half of the US. That hardly seems like news but it does cause anxiety for what you can do to stay warm or to keep the pipes from freezing when the power goes off. An ice storm can hack down power lines and obstruct roads for days at a time. Even oil and gas heaters need air circulation fans to move heat around a house. Most also need the power grid to ignite the fuel. Depending on your own circumstances and what region you live in a Winter power outage can be anything from uncomfortable to disastrous.
Portable propane heaters are a handy and economical way to keep a Winter power outage from turning into a disaster scenario. Portable gas heaters come in several different sizes of heat output capability, so how do you resolve how many heaters you may need, and what sizes to get?
Here’s a speedy method for answering the question about what size portable heater you may need. Portable heaters are rated in BTU. To know 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 example, an 8×10 room with an 8 foot ceiling has a volume of 640 cubic feet (10 x 8 x 8).Next multiply the volume calculation of the room by what we’ll call an arbitrary ‘insulation factor.’ The normal interior 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 lb. cylinders which are available 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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