Alternatives

Propane wall heater in the living room... a very toasty spot!

I guess today I'd like to mention focusing on alternative options.  When living in the country, it's best to not depend on any one form of acquiring or accomplishing the things we need for survival.  I touched on this a bit when I talked about the well vs. city water situation.

For heat here, I have a typical propane gas forced air furnace.  It's necessary not only to keep the chill down in a uniform manner in the house but also to keep the pipes from freezing in the basement.  This will happen at my house and it will be awful.  That's a story for another time.

I also have propane wall heaters (unvented) installed.  One large one in the living room and a smaller one in the kitchen, where I have no heat vent and lots of drafts.  My brother expressed concern about unvented propane heaters, and it's definitely something to be considered.  However, my house is so drafty I doubt that carbon monoxide could build up adequately to be a danger.  Still, I'm cautious.  I don't leave the propane heaters on when I'm gone or at night.

These propane heaters do not require electricity to be turned on or to operate.  The living room heater has an optional blower installed, but it's not necessary.  These heaters will save my life if I'm stuck out here in a snow storm and the power goes off.  They also usually will heat the whole downstairs adequately except in the very coldest of weather.  The only reason I have the furnace run periodically during normal winter weather is to prevent the Freezing of the Pipes I mentioned above (suppressed shudder). 

I also have a few electric space heaters, one in each bathroom and of course a couple others for use in hard to heat areas during extreme temperature drops... like the back porch, where pipes can freeze easily.

The first winter we moved here, about 20 years ago, we were shocked at the amount of propane it took to heat the house.  One day my husband came home with a freestanding kerosene heater.  It had a sort of robotic look to it, put out a lot of heat and pretty flame, and held kerosene in a reservoir at the bottom of the unit, where the wick would extend down and soak up the kerosene.  Similar to a kerosene lantern.

My first reaction to it was terror... open flame?  Fumes?  Liquid petroleum products?  As a northern Iowa country girl, I was familiar with fuel oil stoves, propane heaters, even wood stoves.  But the thought of this monster belching heated air into my living room reminded me of a small nuclear reactor.  (Someday I'll share with you my experiences in Berlin during Chernobyl..)

However, once my husband explained the operation of it, explained how to let it cool before refilling, about periodically burning off the wick to remove smokey deposits, and set me up with a couple 5-gallon containers of kerosene and a siphon to refill the tank... and once I had used it a few days... I was in kerosene heater love!  There are some real specifics to using one of these heaters, such as making sure you don't use up all the oxygen in your house and gas yourself... open flames use oxygen to burn (remember my brother's concern with the propane hater).  And using care in lighting and refilling.  And make sure you don't tip it over or sit things on top of it, because it gets REALLY HOT up top there.  But I will share that after a month of having this heater in the house, you could not have pried it from my fingers.  It was heavenly.  And I became a real pro at wick maintenance and flame adjustment.

The other thing I'd like to mention about heating in the country is zoned heating.  This means, when you can, you might want to take the opportunity to close off certain areas of the house during certain times of the day.  Now that I'm alone here, I've decided to move my bed downstairs and close off the upstairs.  I can also close off the back porch or even the main bathroom when it's not needed, or the spare room on the northwest corner.  With use of the various heaters I have, I can juggle heating certain parts of the house and leaving others cool, and this saves me money.

You need to be careful with any kind of heating appliance, even a furnace.  Many of the things I discuss on here require some common sense and some basic knowledge of certain skills.  So you need to know what you're doing before attempting some of these alternatives.  

You should use your own imagination to diversify when working around your own homestead by using the concept of alternatives.  When spring gets here I intend to discuss alternatives when cooling and ventilating rooms.  There are some fascinating facts about air flow that most people don't understand that I discovered from reading an old 1900s book on home keeping.  

Blessings,

Katrinka