Why Don't AMISH Try This $10 Bucket of Salt That "Heats a Room All Winter"?

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com Three people have written to me this month about a bucket of salt. You have seen it. A plastic pail, fifty pounds of rock salt, and a promise that it will heat a room all winter with nothing plugged in. Ten dollars, and the pictures always seem aimed at people trying to keep the thermostat down. They want to know whether we use it, and whether this is one of the old ways. It is not. Fifty pounds of it, warmed and allowed to cool, gives back roughly what a small electric heater puts out in four minutes, and something had to heat it first. Plain water holds getting on for five times as much and comes out of your tap. But the instinct behind it is right, and there is an answer, and it costs nothing at all. You are not short of heat in that room. There is a heater in there already, running all night, costing nothing, and it is you. A person lying still gives off somewhere around seventy to a hundred watts. In an ordinary bedroom every bit of it goes to the ceiling and is gone. Our bedrooms are not heated. Not underheated. Not heated at all. There is a stove downstairs and nothing upstairs but the cold, and on a January night the water in a glass on the sill will sometimes have ice on it by morning. And nobody in this house has ever been cold in bed. My grandmother showed me why when I was seven. I had been complaining about my room, and she put a coat on me and took me out to the barn, which was not heated either. Down in the corner the lambs were bedded deep in straw, packed in against one another. She had me kneel and put my hand right down into the straw beside them. It was warm, on a night when the trough had skinned over. Then she asked what was warming them, since nothing was heating that barn. What we go through: Why an unheated bedroom with the door shut is a decision rather than a hardship Why a blanket is not warm, and what wool and feathers are actually doing Why two thin blankets beat one thick one, and why a flat old quilt stopped working What goes under you, and why a low bed against a cold wall is the worst arrangement Warming the bed instead of the room, and how to use a hot bottle safely Why every old picture of a person in bed has a cap on The box bed of Brittany, Scotland and the Netherlands, and why the grand four-poster was the same invention in better cloth How to have one tonight with a chair back and a spare quilt, and why you leave the foot open The wing chair in your front room, which was heating equipment before it was furniture The bucket of rock salt, and the arithmetic that settles it Said plainly on safety. Never seal yourself in, because this works by holding your heat rather than your breath. Nothing burning anywhere near draped cloth. Not for a baby, because loose bedding round an infant is dangerous and that is not a matter of opinion. And a cold bedroom is fine for a healthy adult under good bedding and is not fine for everybody. If you are older, or unwell, or on certain medicines, keep the room at a sensible temperature and use everything here on top of it rather than instead of it. And check on anybody living alone in a cold house. Tonight, go up with the heat on and hold your hand near the ceiling, then down at the height of your bed. The difference you feel is your heat on its way out through the roof. Then hang one blanket off a chair back over the head end, and put a warm bottle in twenty minutes before you get in. Tell me in the comments whether your grandmother had a hot water bottle, a hot brick, a soapstone or a warming pan, and what she wrapped it in. Next time we go looking for the cold air coming in whether you invite it or not, with a lit candle and twenty minutes. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #WinterTips #ColdBedroom #BoxBed #HeatingBill #OldWays #Homesteading #SelfReliance #HotWaterBottle #SaltLamp #ThermalMass #SleepWarm #Frugal #HouseholdTips #Amish