Heating and Cooling

[Admin]

Drive through a local neighborhood built in the past 10 years. Count the chimneys. Winter can be cold, how do we keep warm without deforesting the county?

Summer can be very hot. How do we keep cool, especially those most susceptible to the heat?

[pjamer7227]

I am assuming no electricity or gas generator.

Heating and Cooling I consider more of a discomfort than a problem. When I was growing up heat came from a wood stove and cooling came from a breeze.

In this age of propane tanks (Think Barbecue Grill tanks) there are adapters that turn them into portable space heaters or use the smelly kerosene heaters - they still work. If you do not have a fireplace or wood stove these are the only 2 options I can think of that can be purchased before an emergency & be ready at a moment's need.

A propane cook stove can be used to provide some quick heat if you have one for household use.

There are power converters you can buy at radio Shack that will convert the 12 Volt DC from your car Cigarette lighter opening into 120 volt AC - 600 Watt is the Max I have found. Next go to Home Depot (or On Line) & purchase an 18 Volt Ryobi Fan - Model P3300 - it has 2 settings High and Low. Purchase an 18 Volt Lithium battery & charger separately. Then when you have to go somewhere you can charge a battery & use it later.

I have ran the fan all night on low with a fully charged battery and it beats not having it - Been There and Done that. You will not get cold - but it will take the edge off. Blowing warm air can only cool you so much. (Works for camping also) The beauty is you can buy the drill, sander, Vac, Flash light, plainer, Chain saw & other 18 volt tools & they all use the same battery. Comes in handy when there is no electricity & you have a small job to do. I have about 6 batteries & make sure they are charged. The last time we lost power the 12 Volt DC power converter & the 18 volt Battery tools came in handy.

[Admin]

Is there a safe way to create an in home heat source that's wood burning without a woodstove or fireplace?

I'm something of a scrounger. One of those people that if I have a problem and need a cheap solution, I look around at what I have and use it to make what I need. Here's my thought about it.

The fire-pot and impromptu vent(power is out, no kerosene, and it's getting cold)

Ok-get a good sized pot. I suggest placing it up on some sizable rocks(they're all over the woods and near the creeks and rivers) in a room with a window or near a bathroom with an exhaust fan. Now, this will take a little doing, but in your walls, you usually have some duct hose for your dryer and your bathroom fans. It's usually just kind of shoved in there, so it's not hard to get out once you knock a hole in the drywall near where it's taped to the vent and the fan. Grab that.

Now, you need a "hood" for it. Anything that you can make into an umbrella sort of shape will do, as long as there's a spot at the middle you could attach your ducting to it. You could brace it off the floor with chairs or hang it from the ceiling, but it needs to be about 3 feet above the fire-pot, and you need to keep an eye on it to adjust it if you notice the smoke expanding out too fast or slowly enough you can raise it and it still gather the smoke into the duct at the center. (There needs to be a hole at the center, and that's where you attach the duct at the top.)

Attach the duct with, well, whatever. The better the seal you make, the better it will work. Run the duct as far as you can. Whether you need to shove it through a door, a window, or even to a spot maybe where you left a piece of duct to the exhaust fan. The goal is to get the smoke out of the house so you don't die of smoke inhalation.

Note: I would not light the fire, then leave it unattended. Your house is flammable, and you may need to adjust the hood.

Now you have a spot inside the house where you can cook semi-safely, and the rocks underneath the pot should grab some of the warmth. Take the rock and put it in your blanket before you get in bed, and it will warm it up.

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Concerns about this, though. 1: How much heat can a steel pot take before it becomes a hazard itself? 2: This sounds like a small cook fire, so what if you need a larger fire? 3: How much heat can really come from this? 4: Does anyone know any step by step ways of lighting a fire for something like this if the matches are gone? 5: What are the signs that your ducting isn't doing the job, before it gets toxic? The place is going to smell like smoke, so that's no indicator. Besides which, smoke has it's own heat, so what will one of these ducts take before that becomes dangerous?

Another impromptu thing for cooling:

The human powered fan

This is simple. Nearly everyone has a bike of some kind somewhere, and if you don't, grab one, they're cheap. Ceiling fans are pretty common, too, but if you don't have one, get a box fan. You need them for parts, not usage.

Take the bike, set it up so the back wheel is off the ground a good ways. Now, take your fan blades. If they're from a ceiling fan, I'd say simply take them completely off the mechanical portion of the fan, remove the metal attaching piece, then use what you have to secure the blades within the back wheel, to the spokes. If you have a box fan, the blades attach to a round plastic piece at the middle. Open it up however you must, and remove the blade attachment with as little damage as possible, and attach it to the wheel.

You're done, sort of. You have to brace it so you can stand there and turn the pedals, but you can produce some gale force winds even if you have it set up to turn by hand. Now, it won't help the guy turning the pedal, but it will be a relief for everyone else.

While I'm on the topic of using the bicycle for something besides transportation-I'll have to research it some, but there is a way to produce a small amount of dc voltage this way. (remember the old hand-crank phones? same concept) If you set it up right, a person could trickle charge a battery or something so that maybe you could have some electric light or something.

One note for extra cooling: put a basin of water in front of the fan. It will work like a humidifier.

Note 2: Neither of these things are for times when you know the power is coming back on sometime humanly soon. This is super-duper emergency thinking using stuff you have around. If the power is out and no telling when or if it's being fixed, you got to do what you got to do.

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