Knowing beforehand the practical ways of surviving without electricity will prepare you adequately in case of happenstances. Electricity is the livewire of living, and a disconnect from it can therefore be devastating. Clearly, its importance cannot be overstated.
In this article, we’ll look at the ways to stay afloat with your cooling and heating systems in the absence of this highly essential power. Let me add that the tips are not restricted to a post-crisis world. They can also be just what you need to transition into an off-the-grid lifestyle.
Practical Ways of Surviving Without Electricity (Heating & Cooling)
Provided we have enough to pay the bills, we usually don’t care about cooling and heating since there’s always electricity to keep us going. But what happens when you lose electricity after disaster strikes? Let us look at ways to improvise and survive.
Keeping Your Home Cool Without Electricity
If you’re one who pays close attention to electricity bills, you’ll know that your home’s cooling system (air conditioners, fans & what else) eats up a considerable portion of your entire payments. Thus, it may be pleasantly surprising that you can cut off cooling bills (which make up about 30%) by applying certain practical techniques. Here are a few steps to take to keep your home cool, even in the absence of electricity.
- First, keep out the sun during the day using white, heavy curtains with tin foil (make sure the shiny side is turned out). These drapes are to be opened just after sunset when you can feel that the hotness of the day is cooling off, and are to be closed before the day breaks and the sun starts rising. Ensure that these drapes extend to the window sides too, so sunlight doesn’t filter in at all. This must be kept if you desire to maintain a comfortable temperature in your home.
- Always lock doors whose rooms are not in use. This includes the central air vents, so you must ensure that they are shut off when doing nothing. To ensure that air does not leak through, seal off the vents using tin foil and tape.
- Build a buckwheat hull pillow. This pillow type usually contains more airspace than an ordinary mattress stuffing or conventional pillow. Use a hull pillow with cotton sheets to keep you cooler while asleep. If you like, you can make a pillow that’s wide enough to serve your whole bed, although this will cost more materials.
- Get and use a couple of box fans positioned at strategic positions around your home. This fan blows inward, thus pulling cooler air inside. To make a box fan more effective, place a wet fabric on a stand directly in front of it. This will cause the room to become cooler as the water evaporates, as the temperature is influenced too.
- Get small fans that run on batteries and use them on your reading table or other parts of the home you spend a lot of time in. Alternatively, you can get mini fans that run on solar, thereby eliminating the need for any external source of power.
With these done, you should also caulk every door to cover up all means that may give an escape to cool air. And if you can, build an air conditioning system that is powered by solar.
Maintaining Heat Without Electricity
Except you’ve been using electric baseboards & heaters, I doubt that you realize how much you spend on your heating system. Fans, gas furnaces, operating oil, and severe other parts of the system run on electricity (as you may know), and any electricity breakdown may freeze you out if care is not taken. Let’s look at a few methods to cut down or abandon electricity usage in keeping your home warm.
- Buy or build candle heaters to have for tiny rooms or some parts of a room. For instance, if you live in a large home, you can light up your candle and set it just by where you sit, maybe your desk or anywhere else. This will provide you with enough heat to stay warm and provide some lighting if necessary. While using this, remember to seal off the heat vents in that room using tin foil & duct tape to ensure that no heat escapes the room. This will lower the need for electricity in your home, or in some cases, even negate its entire use towards heating. Need I say that you stop using the costly electric heater in your room now.
- Make a solar heater using a tin can. These little heaters are perfect for small or medium-size rooms. To take things a little further, run PVC pipes through the insides of these runs & then using a solar-operated water pump, pipe warm, healthy water through your home. Keep in mind that this system feeds into your central air vents. This may be expensive to install, but it’s worth it. You’re spending mainly on water radiators, no? Asides from the fact that you save more on electricity, the air inside your home is rid of dust and germs. Impressive if you ask anyone.
- A more unconventional but highly effective method is to use food scraps. This is done by making a compost pile using food scraps. After this is done, run hot water PVC pipes underneath the pile, connecting the system to run through your walls. Brilliant, affordable technology, isn’t it?
- Keep all hot air inside your home. This is done in several ways. For a start, use heavy-duty transparent plastic vinyl to block off your windows & frames. This is because regardless of your windows’ newness or efficiency, they may be allowing up to 30% of the air within to escape. A little space in your window is letting a lot of air escape, but you may not realize it. Also, caulk off your doors & frames. On especially windy, cold days, seal all air openings with newspapers. Additionally, shut off rooms that are not in use. Switch off the air vents and other mediums that may cause air to escape from important rooms to unimportant ones.
- Put on additional layers of heavy clothing and huddle up with others in a single room (if possible).
Final Thoughts on the Practical Ways of Surviving Without Electricity
For a person who’s spent some nights out in the cold with his teeth clattering and limbs going numb, there’s no need to emphasize the importance of having a functional heating system when the cold weather comes. The same applies to a person who’s sweated unceasingly until he passed out due to extreme heat, although in his case, a cooling system is his priority. Read through again: which of these practical ways of surviving without electricity have you ever put to practice? Did it work? Let’s hear from you.