2017 - 2018 Winter Heat Source

[JohnyMac]

The best time to mount an attach against any country whether it is economic, grid down, pandemic, EMP, et cetera would be winter.

Any hostile drama would have the best effect to neutralize a citizenry would be winter. Then come in to mop up in the spring/summer.

With that written I am curious as to what primary heat and then secondary heat you have available at your primary AO.

I will start it out with:

Primary - Wood for our wood stove
Secondary - Kerosene heater

We are also looking into installing two (20,000 BTU) wall mounted or one small force air furnace (50,000 BTU) fired by propane. Both the wall mounted and furnace units would be powered by an inverter getting its 120V from our battery ban/solar system.

So please share your heat source and your thoughts....

[Jackalope]

We heat primarily with wood, with solar hot air as a supplemental source.  I'll use propane as a secondary source, and kerosene too!

[Kbop]

JM, we have geothermal and wood - if really bad, site generated electricity.

I agree with you about timing except for the pandemic idea - if it is a malicious act, i would assume it would hit in the summer vacation season for max spread.

[JohnyMac]

Good point Kbop!

[trailman]

We have a wood stove in the main room that we run all winter. In the back room there is a propane stove we run for heat off a 500 gal buried tank. That also runs the main furnace if we need it. I've got about 10 gal of kerosene for lamps etc. Plus the standard 10 5gal cans of gas, We also keep about 10 20 gal propane tanks to run a cook stove.

If I made a hot it would be early fall before the major grain crops were harvested.

[JohnyMac]

trailman,
down to a bit less than 1/2 a cord. This year we will have used six cords of wood when all is said and done.

We didn't install the 20,000 Rinnai wall mounted propane heater. Instead we had installed a 70,000 BTU forced air furnace. In the end, it was a bit more expensive but a lot more efficient. MrsMac used the furnace for one week, when I was in Vegas at the Shot Show. So wood still is our primary fuel/heating source.

On kerosene for our Aladdin lamps, I sharpened my pencil and grabbed a napkin one day to figure out how much kerosene I would use in a year for lighting only. My final number came out just over 50 gallons. So a 55 gallon drum would work just fine.

Now, if I was a bit conservative with my lighting use I probably would get 16-18 months out of 55 gallons of kerosene.