11 AutoZone Items That'll Be WORTH GOLD in a Winter Blackout

It is the third night of the blackout. You can see your breath in the kitchen, the thermostat is blank, and the gas furnace is silent because its fan and its igniter both need electricity. Your phone says four percent. The junk-drawer candles are puddles. Most of what got my family through winter outages, including one ice storm that kept us dark for five days, did not come from a survival catalog. It came from the auto parts store you drive past every week. So nobody gets the wrong idea, here is where I stand. None of this will heat your house. It will not run your fridge, your furnace or your well pump. What it does is store power, get it out safely, and hold on to the heat your body already makes. And the same items keep your car ready to start in the cold, so when the roads open you can get gas, get to a warming center, or get to family. Your car is a battery bank on wheels. When the pipe runs dry, the only water you have is what is in the tank, and electricity works the same way. Most people store the most important item on this list in the one place guaranteed to make it fail: the glovebox, at the same temperature as the air outside, where a cold battery has the strength but cannot get it out. What we go through: The lithium jump starter, a box smaller than a hardback book that I would take over a case of candles on night three Why a small inverter beats a giant two-thousand-watt one, and why running it with the engine off can cost you your ride Pure sine wave for a CPAP or anything medical Where the jump starter lives in winter, and why you let a frozen one warm up before charging A battery maintainer, the quiet insurance behind everything else Fuel stabilizer, and why it does nothing for old gas Where the gas can goes, and why pumps go dark with the grid LED work lights and headlamps instead of open flames Hand and foot warmers, and where they do and do not belong Mylar blankets, and why they work under your blanket, not crumpled on top The tarp and duct tape that people laugh at until the second night A twelve-volt heated blanket, and its honest limit Distilled water jugs, and reading the label before anybody drinks it The upkeep calendar and the test night before winter What the six hundred dollar power station really is inside Said plainly on safety: never run your car in an attached garage. Not with the door open, not for ten minutes. The CDC says exhaust can push into the house even with the door wide open, and carbon monoxide has no smell, no color and no warning. During the Texas freeze a woman and a young girl died in Houston, and investigators believed a car had been running in the garage for heat. Car outside, open air, tailpipe cleared of snow, and a battery-powered carbon monoxide alarm in the house. If your house gets dangerously cold and a warming center is open, go. There is no magic in the expensive kit. Open a boxed seventy-two-hour kit and you find Mylar, hand warmers and a little flashlight. It is only that nobody makes a living telling you to keep a jump starter charged in a bin by the door. Right now, go find your jump starter. Not tomorrow. If you know where it is and it is charged, comment found it. If it is dead or you do not have one, say that too. No shame in it. Tell me where you are building your preps, a basement, a garage, an apartment closet, a car trunk. And tell me this: what is the coldest blackout you ever lived through? #WinterPrep #PowerOutage #Blackout #EmergencyPreparedness #Prepping #AutoZone #JumpStarter #PowerInverter #WinterStorm #IceStorm #CarbonMonoxide #CarEmergencyKit #SelfReliance #BudgetPrepping #StayWarm