If you are young and like to camp out this might be okay. However, I'm 75 and this just doesn't work very well for me because if the living room is 56 degrees, how cold is the bedroom I was sleeping in?
I don't have the answer to this question and the only reason I knew what temperature my living room was when I got up is I salvaged and old hot tub temperature gauge which told me this. My newer hot tub has a digital temperature gauge built in so I don't need it outside anymore.
The reason for all this is because there has been no power since Sunday. I have a Yamaha 2200 generator but my wife and I are older and getting up every 4 hours to shut off the generator (for safety) and adding regular Gasoline and starting it up 24 hours a day gets kind of old especially doing this continuously since Sunday Morning when our power and up to a million other people's power went off Sunday and Monday throughout the state of California. However, it hasn't stopped raining which is the main reason we don't have power because working as a lineman in rain is a good way to die. So, any linemen who don't want to die usually don't work much in the rain. So, I'm thinking Friday or after when the rain finally stops for awhile is when most power is going to come back on.
However, try to picture the havoc in people's lives with no power. There are still 8000 people just in my area which is about 20 miles square who don't have power since Sunday. And 8000 people actually means in reality 8000 customers and so each outage likely means between 1 and 4 or more people's lives are affected and mostly without any heating. For example, our Central heating system is natural gas but will not work at all without an electric sparker to keep the pilot light lit.
And running my generator to my heating system just isn't practical from my point of view. I understand full well most things electrical but have no experience at all with gas so i would prefer if an expert did this.
So, anyway (that might be a question I pursue with someone who installs natural Gas heating systems by the way).
But just as an electrician I wouldn't feel safe trying to gerry rig something like this by myself because enough homes are blowing up because they have gas heating systems already all over the U.S.
We have two friends that died in North Carolina because of a mud slide that hit their home it sheared off a gas line and they had the electrical shut off but then the automatic generator came on and blew them both up and they died.
So, you see why electrically gerry rigging my heating system doesn't seem like a good idea. So far, we ahve stayed warm only because we have a fire place to warm up and down sleeping bags in addition to a quilt on our bed.
Our housekeeper's mother didn't have power until this morning since Sunday morning and is now sick because of it because she didn't have any way to get warm like a fireplace like we do. So, I'm hoping she doesn't wind up in the hospital because of getting too cold and getting sick (possibly from a level of hypothermia). Now multiply this number by even in our 20 square mile area by 8000 homes and businesses. That's another thing. People in our area can't open up their shops and restaurants either until they get power too.
How many people will go homeless caused by power outages like this around the country? People who are financially on edge anyway are often driven onto the streets but things like this.
Global Climate change likely shouldn't be calibrated by how many people die during storms but rather how many people's lives are destroyed by those storms long term.
This is one of the reasons that homelessness has grown about 20% since Covid here in the U.S.
NOTE:
After burning a fire in my fireplace for 3 or 4 hours the living room temperature went up to 58 degrees by the way. However, I moved a leather couch in front of the fire place so at least we have a place to warm up there.
Also, we have a gas stove top that allows itself to be lit by matches. If you get one be sure it will do this for emergencies so you can still cook on a stove top.
Also, the main reason you need a generator is that all the food in your refrigerator will soon go bad within a couple of days if you don't have a generator to keep it cold and freezing.
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