I Tested 6 Ways to Heat a Room With No Power. Five Quit by Midnight. One Logging Camps Used in 1938

The power goes out at nine on a January night. For an hour you are fine. Then the furnace fan or the blower on the insert goes quiet, and the heat that used to move down the hall stays in one room and goes nowhere. By midnight the back bedroom is fifty-one. By morning it is forty-four. Every one of us has a plan for that night that we have never tried. I tried six of them. I pulled the main breaker on this house for seventy-two hours in January, with the stove running in the kitchen the way it would in a real outage, and tested one way a night in the back bedroom thirty-one feet away, with a thermometer on the dresser, one in the bed, a carbon monoxide detector with a new battery, and a notebook. The candle in a can. The flowerpot over the tea lights. The little propane heater. Virgil's 1979 kerosene heater. The room itself, door shut, blankets, two people. And the sixth, which is in my grandfather's tally book under February 1938, the night the bunkhouse stove went out at forty below above the Cranberry and eighty men did not freeze. Seven words. It cost nothing, it was still working at six in the morning, and nobody sells it. I also tell you which ones I would not sleep next to for any money, and the ones I did not test and never will, because every winter the health department counts the families who did. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and one ice storm in January 1977 I have never forgotten. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: never run a propane or kerosene heater while you sleep, never without a window open and a working carbon monoxide detector, and never a grill, generator, vehicle or gas oven indoors. Your heater's manual outranks me. Hot bricks: fired dry clay brick or soapstone only, never a creek rock or a wet brick, three hundred degrees at most, two layers of towel, never touching skin or sheet.