I never realized how deadly winter time storms can get in just a matter of hours.
There was a sad news story Last weekend regarding the fate of an elderly couple during a big ice storm.
Their electricity went out while they were snowed-in at their house. They didn’t have a generator plus both were surviving on oxygen tanks. No family members or first responders could get to the elderly couple who were later presumed to have died the third day without electricity. It’s sad plus a little scary, but it’s important to understand these dangers if you have a choice to live in a region with winters as extreme as our own. You cannot survive through the roughest patches of winter time weather if you don’t have indoor heat. Because I don’t want to be stuck without electricity and no heat, I have decided to use our wood stove as our primary heat source. Last year I made it through the entire winter time on just a few dead trees from our property that I hauled into our driveway and spent almost a week slowly splitting into enough wood to form many cords worth of wood in our garage. That was enough wood for the entire winter. Whenever I needed more heat, I simply walked into our garage and grabbed myself a pile of firewood. If I had any allergies to smoke I might be in a bad situation, but so far I haven’t noticed any respiratory or sinus related concerns after switching to burning wood for heat. It’s also nice having a fine wood stove that emits most of its heat into the current home instead of sending most of it up the chimney like a traditional fireplace would.