The wintertime can be rough on your home and heating system. Whether you’re dealing with an outage due to weather or a system breakdown, it’s important to keep you and the family warm in the event of an emergency. Here are some ways you can do that:
Use your fireplace.
Without a furnace, your fire feature is the next best thing to keep you and your family warm. Turn on the fireplace or light it and keep to the room it’s in.
Find some safe unit heaters.
It’s important to keep areas with plumbing warm so your pipes don’t freeze if your heating has been off for a long time. We have units available for our customers or you can always purchase these in an emergency.
Do some baking.
The oven should never be used as a heating alternative, but it can help warm up the room if it’s already in use for baking or cooking.
Wear lots of layers.
Try to keep as much heat trapped on your skin with warm, layered clothes. Keeping your feet and head warm will help regulate your overall body temperature, so also focus on keeping those areas covered.
Avoid opening any doors or windows.
If you have, for example, a dog to take outside, try to really limit how long you keep the door open. Warm air can escape quickly.
Grab sleeping bags and blankets.
Sleeping bags are great because they’re already made to help keep your body warm when camping, so they’re perfect to have on hand. Continue to layer up with some blankets for better insulation.
Drink warm drinks.
If it’s only the furnace that’s out and you still have power, then you can heat up some drinks like coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and warm milk.
Do some exercise.
Warming up your body with some exercise will help if you’re struggling to regulate body heat. Just be careful not to sweat too much so that your clothes become wet.
Set up a tent or stay in one room.
Pick a smaller room and close the door to help conserve heat in that space. If that doesn’t work, and you have a tent, then try setting it up in one of the larger areas of the home.
Before anything, if it’s your heating that has gone out, you need to contact a heating and cooling company. For homeowners located in the Twin Cities, they can call our emergency 24/7 line which is essential for instances just like this. Binder Heating & Air Conditioning is a family-owned company and has been rooted in the Twin Cities metro for over 90 years.
