Thread by @sethanikeem

Some of you (particularly in the US) may find yourselves in a fairly chilly situation today & tomorrow thanks to a harsh winter storm.

Here are some cheap hacks to keep your space as warm as possible if the grid crashes:

Spoiler: you’ll need cloth. Sheets, old towels, etc.,

Drapery: tack up a sheet, curtain, or long cloth across every doorway & entrance to a room. if you’ve got a tensor rod you can put in the frame and a way to hook the cloth over that, great. Otherwise, thumbtacks, nails, even a staplegun will get the job done. (cont’d)

If you have limited supplies, pick the room you’ll spend the most time in & put draperies over all its doors and entrances. This helps to seal in what little heat you have, including your own body heat. It cuts down on drafts. (cont’d)

You also want to seal windows. A lot of our heat leaks out of there even if they’re supposedly insulated. Heavy plastic is the best. Duct tape is your friend but masking tape will work.

Lacking sheets of heavy plastic, grab some plastic grocery bags & patchwork that shit.

If you can’t completely cover the whole window (establishing the seal around the frame) *at the least* check the joints & cover these with tape or stuff bits of rags in the gaps.

Failing that, tape the curtains down. Put up the heaviest cloth you have as curtains.

Outward-facing doors: Roll up some old towels & make a line along the bottom of outward-facing doors to catch the drafts that will whistle in underneath. If there are really big gaps around your door, consider draping a curtain temporarily over that door as well.

If your heat goes out, gather everyone into the warmest & most insulated room of the house. This might even be a big closet; you want a small space with its airflow controlled to trap in as much heat as possible. *Be careful about burning anything in sealed rooms! CO2 kills*

Seriously: unless you have a working fireplace, resist the urge to burn things in your home to keep warm. Without proper ventilation, that’s a recipe for disaster.

You can get away with a few candles, carefully monitored. They shed a surprising amount of heat in small spaces.

I was raised by folks who grew up in the Great Depression in a drafty split-level home built in the 40s. We used all kinds of hacks to try to keep that place warm when money was tight & the winters were long.

Plastic on the windows, draft catchers at doors, sealing off rooms

Stay safe. Keep warm. Pull out all the blankets & don’t be afraid to cuddle up together to conserve body heat.

And be *really* careful with space heaters, especially the old kerosene ones. Lots of ways that can go bad quickly.

Other notes: Rooms with higher ceilings will take longer to get warm as heat rises and it’s all hanging out unhelpfully among the rafters.

Basement spaces might feel colder at first, but if you’ve got a finished basement, it’s naturally insulated by being underground.

Pipes: If you think your pipes might burst due to the cold, turn on a tiny trickle of water. Yes, this wastes water. That sucks. But it keeps stuff flowing through the pipes & they are less likely to freeze.

Exposed pipes or ones close to outward facing walls are most at risk.

Believe me when I say running a small trickle of water all night is preferable to the damage caused by burst pipes due to the cold.

More on burst pipes: do yourself a favor and go figure out where to turn your water off now. There’s usually something that turns off all the water in the house and often controls for certain sections or individual appliances.

When it comes to turning the water off for apartments & similar multi family housing situations, it gets trickier - you may not have access to where the water gets turned on and off.

Also to circle back around draperies: I am a huge fan of curtains. Not only over your windows. Over doorways. Around your bed.

If, like me, you read a lot of books written pre-1900, you noticed they talked about bed curtains a lot. Those helped insulate where people slept.

There is a reason why my current writing space looks like this. It is basically a pullman car in my finished basement. These aren’t heavy curtains, but pulling them even partially closed significantly insulates the space. (I am seated on the bed)

I no longer live in circumstances where we have to wonder whether or not we’re going to put the heat on today, but the lessons of my youth have stuck with me.

IMO it’s never a bad idea to conserve energy. Certainly never a bad idea to be prepared.

My home: curtains EVERYWHERE! (heavier curtains are great for muffling sound from room to room as well as catching drafts, cutting down on background noise while livestreaming)

Probably not the advice you expected to receive from that weird psychic goth person you’ve maybe seen on TV, but like an onion (or an ogre), I have many layers.