A Practical Guide To Winter Power Outages

The lights go out, the house starts to chill, and the clock begins to tick on your pipes, your food, and your morale. We walk you through a clear, common-sense plan to ride out a winter blackout without panic or pricey gear. From sealing one warm room to picking the safest heat sources, this guide focuses on what works, what’s affordable, and what actually keeps your family safe.

We start with the hidden hazards: why pipes burst, how long it really takes for a freeze to happen, and how to buy time with insulation, closed vents, and a slow drip. Then we get into human safety. Hypothermia can creep up fast, especially for kids and older adults, so we break down the early signs and the layering system that helps you hold onto heat. Carbon monoxide gets no second chances, so you’ll learn how to position a portable propane heater safely, why ventilation matters, and how to place CO detectors to protect sleeping areas.

Gear doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective. Bubble wrap on windows, thrifted thermal curtains, towel draft stoppers, and shrink-film kits can slash heat loss dramatically. LED headlamps and crank flashlights free your hands for cooking and repairs. We talk food and power management too: moving perishables into coolers with frozen water jugs, keeping fridge doors shut, and cooking simple, high-protein meals without fresh produce. Black bean burgers, minimalist chili, and quick refrieds prove that shelf-stable can still taste great when it’s cold outside.

We also tackle generator safety and realistic load planning, plus surge protection to guard electronics. And for those worried about EMPs, we separate myth from fact, sharing simple shielding options like ammo cans lined with cardboard or an unplugged microwave for spare radios, batteries, and medical devices. With a 72-hour mindset, a sealed warm room, safe heat, light you can count on, and honest food that fuels, a winter outage becomes manageable.

If this helped you feel more prepared for cold-weather outages, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs a plan, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Today’s Focus
• 0:55 Why Winter Outages Are Dangerous
• 3:15 Preventing Frozen Pipes
• 5:54 Hypothermia And CO Risks
• 8:21 Outage Trends And 72‑Hour Mindset
• 10:00 Budget Gear That Actually Works
• 12:59 Room Sealing And Layering
• 16:01 Food Safety And Morale

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

Hey all, this is Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast. November 4th, 2025. The government is still shut down. So let's talk about some fun stuff and steer away from politics and all those shenanigans. Let's talk about cold weather preps and what you do to survive when the power goes out in the winter. So picture this. A few winters ago here in Central Virginia, there was an ice storm. And in central Virginia, we don't get a lot of snow normally. It's the ice. A quarter inch of ice or less can take down power lines. So nasty ice storm, power was down for about 72 hours. Got down to about 28 degrees in my house, but I was ready. Bundled up like an Eskimo on a bad hair day. I do have gas logs, but I gotta be careful about how long I run those. So here's a few things that you can do to try to make your stay in your home in the winter without power more tolerable. Why do winter power outages suck so bad? It's not just the dark, it's the dangers lurking in the cold. And when the power goes out, if you're like me, you flip on the light switch every time you walk in the room for the next three days, somehow just out of habit, and then you're not surprised when the lights don't come on. Frozen pipe, water freezes, it expands, and there goes your pipes. That means flooding underneath the sink. That means flooding underneath the house, crawling underneath the house with leaky pipes in the middle of power outage in winter is not a good time. In the fall or in the summer, go ahead and insulate your pipes. Keep a little bit of water running out of the faucets just to keep the water moving. Sometimes it helps, but sometimes it doesn't. It depends on how cold it gets and how long it stays below freezing. So for example, it's gonna be 45 here tonight. If for some reason it drops down to 28 degrees, and for something, let's say 28 degrees under my house, which is not going to be, but let's assume it is, those several hours of 28 degree weather is not going to be enough to freeze my pipes. You need consistently cold weather near or below freezing for an extended period of time. What does extended mean? I have no idea. If your crawl space is closed up, that's better than if the crawl space vents are open and the wind and the breeze is allowed to flow through and keep exchanging the warmer air for colder air under your house. Hypothermia. Hypothermia is kind of a tricky thing. Whenever your body drops below, your core body temperature drops below 95 degrees, you're potentially looking at a hypothermic type of situation. Now, you're not at 95, 94 degrees, you're gonna be fine, but anytime your core temperature drops below 98.6, you need to consider that. You're shivering, you get confused, that's when hypothermia really sets in. Young folks and older folks, so the kids and grandparents, are the hardest hit when it comes to hypothermia. And then the silent killer, carbon monoxide, from generators to indoor heaters, always vent outside. What 2021, that freak winter ice storm that came through Texas? 246 people died. Many of them died from carbon monoxide poisoning. They had no idea what they were facing. Many folks had generators running in their homes and extension cords running to appliances. Several people died from carbon monoxide poisoning. If you're gonna have a generator, have it outside, have it in the garage, but have the garage vented. Open the garage door a little bit, have a fan running, do not run your generator inside your house. So with the climate getting weirder and weirder, we're seeing more polar vortices and bomb cyclones. I'm not sure if those are terms the weather channel made up a few years ago, but when I was growing up, it was called a winter storm. FEMA predicts on an average winter season in the United States, there's roughly a thousand outages that will leave millions of folks in the dark. Now, the average power outage is only five to six hours, but if a big storm, it can certainly go for days. So, as always, with severe storms, hurricanes, power outage, always prep for at least 72 hours. That's the golden rule. All right, let's talk about gear. You do not need to go to a survivalist warehouse and purchase everything off the shelves to be prepared for something like this. This is stuff we can get at Dollar Tree, Amazon, Harbor Freight, all under 50 bucks, easily under 50 bucks. So let's break it down. This is something I found interesting. Bubble wrap on your windows. Spray a little bit of water on the glass to get the bubble wrap to stick. It cuts heat loss up to 50%. Now, what I'm gonna try in my Florida room this winter is the heavy plastic that you put across the window and then you hit it with a hairdryer and it kind of shrink fits around the window. I've got a Florida room with I don't know how many windows, 10 or 12 windows. And in the summer, it gets really, really hot. And in the winter it gets really, really cold. But I think I'm gonna try that. Here's another easy one towels, wrap up an old towel and use it as a draft snake, I guess. They make all sorts of these. You don't have to use towels. You can, there's commercial versions of these. They look, you know, one looks like a little doch in a little wiener dog, and they have little designs on them. But a t-shirt, old towels just wrapped up and shoved up against the door. Thrift store thermal curtains are fantastic. Now, my first introduction to thermal curtains, I spent quite a bit of time in Scotland and in the winter months. And one of the places I stayed was a large limestone house. And in the evening, we would close these heavy curtains or heavy drapes. They look like quilts. These things were so heavy, but you would close those and it would really keep the room warm. Something to think about emergency heat sources. So my go-to is a Mr. Buddy propane heater. It's about$40. It's safe for indoors. If you crack a window, provide a little bit of ventilation. You don't have to put it out in the garage. You can have it indoors, but a little bit of ventilation. Pair that with some Mylar emergency blankets. You can pick up five or six of those hot water bottles. If you're able to heat up some water, put it in the hot water bottles, and then tuck that near your feet, bottom of your sleeping bag. Now, something that most people swear by, and that's those candle heaters. They stack tea lights under a terracotta planter, a terracotta pot, and it radiates heat like a mini furnace. A lot of people swear by those. I've tried those, but I must be doing something wrong because I can't get it to work right. And it doesn't put off much radiant heat at all. For lighting and power, LED headlamps, talked about that before, about 10 bucks. Hands-free cooking helps a whole lot when you can have both hands free. Crank flashlights, don't have batteries, not a problem. Now, when the power goes out, this is the first thing we want to do. In the first hour, unplug everything so you protect it against surges when the power does return. Gather everybody in one room, the family room, it would not be the Florida room in my place, but a smaller room where everybody fits comfortably. Take blankets or quilts and seal off the other entryway. So an entryway into the Florida room in my case, or the entryway to the front room or the living room, or the bedrooms or the office. Go ahead and hang heavy blankets to isolate the room that you're in. So the heat that you are able to produce, that you are able to make for that room, stays there with you. Dress in layers: wool base layer, fleece front middle layer, a windproof outer layer, hat, gloves. I know it sounds kind of silly walking around your house with hats and gloves, but you gotta stay warm. In the morning, check your faucets to make sure they're dripping. Check your pipes to make sure they're not frozen. If you haven't prepped and you don't have water, you can always consider melting snow. And if you don't like to cook, if you don't have a little, if you don't have a grill for the garage, if you don't have a little camp stove, a little butane stove, well, you might be stuck with peanut butter sandwiches or cold beans or cold chili out of the can. Most of us would have some sort of alternate type of cooking option. Zero degree sleeping bags, not very expensive, about$30,$40 on Amazon. They trapheat very, very well. If the power is going to be out for an extended period of time, move things from your fridge and freezer into a cooler. Now remember what I spoke about a couple months ago. In my freezer in my garage, I have two or three cases of water that are frozen. So now for this particular freezer, if I don't open it, the food is going to stay good for a longer time because those cases of water are in essence huge blocks of ice. Now, what I could do is when the power goes out, grab one of my coolers, grab one of those cases of water, and put it into one of my standby coolers. And then when I need to remove things from the fridge or from the freezer, I then can move them into the cooler. Kids and pets, make sure you've got plenty of games. It keeps the morale high. It keeps everybody's mind off of how cold they are and what's really going on. So here's a little myth. Solar blankets are not miracle workers, they reflect body heat. So when you're laying down or you're sitting on the floor and you have one of the mylar blankets, sit down on a piece of cardboard because it keeps the heat in. So have something under you so the solar blanket works better. A generator, a 5,000 watt generator, about four or$500. Generator 101, I think, is a podcast they did a long time ago. Go back into the archives and pull that one up. But with a generator, we're talking about just the essentials. Some lights, fridge, run some extension cords, and again, never use the generator indoors. CO2 poisoning signs, headache, nausea. Get fresh air immediately. Monitor the person if they have potential carbon monoxide poisoning, and call 911 if you need to. So while we're talking about myths, let's talk about some myths that are associated with EMPs. So first, one pulse of an EMP turns your car into scrap metal. Not entirely true. Most cars made after 1980 will do okay if you have an EMP, no guarantees. You hear a lot of people say, well, get a car, a car truck built in like 1977. No computers, nothing electronic. There is something to say for that. But just regular old run-of-the-mill EMP is not going to fry every car, every piece of electronics. EMPs are electromagnetic, they're not microwave, so they're not going to kill you. It's not going to fry you. There's no radiation involved. There might be a glitch with some satellites. GPS could lag, it could go offline, it might come back, it might not. Surge protectors are very useful. Make sure you have a few of those. You should have your laptop and desktop and other things, TV. You should have those plugged into surge protectors regardless. Now, your phones, it depends. They're relatively safe, but you can always put them in a Faraday bag. And you can also shield them. Here's a couple different ways you can shield them without a Faraday bag. You can wrap your phone in tinfoil. You can wrap your key or your key fob in tinfoil. Of course, Faraday cages for radios, chargers, GPSs, a metal ammo can as a makeshift Faraday cage. Make sure the lid is tight and make sure your phone or whatever you're putting inside the ammo box is not coming in contact with the metal, with the actual ammo box itself. Put it over some cardboard, wrap it in bubble wrap, make sure it stays away from the sides or the bottom of the metal ammo can. Microwave ovens, if you can believe it. An unplugged microwave oven makes a very good Faraday cage. Make sure it's closed. You want to be extra careful about it. You can always take some duct tape and duct tape over the door area just to seal it up. Your hand crank radio, insulin pumps, CPAPs, spare batteries, solar chargers. Pull the battery from your laptop, wrap it up, put it in a Faraday box, put it in a Faraday cage if you're worried about that. So those are some of the things that you don't want to take chances on. Your phone, your keys, and any of those medical devices. So solar flares present a risk, a small risk of an EMP-like situation. But unless it's a major EMP that's detonated several miles above the surface of the earth, those are the ones you need to worry about. And again, depending on the size. And as I have researched EMPs, it won't just be one, it'll be multiple. So if a particular part of the country gets hit with an EMP, everyone's like, oh my gosh, my phone still works, my car still works, let me go out driving. And then the second one hits, and then the third one hits. There'll be multiple EMPs to make sure that most of the electronics vehicles are wiped and taken out of commission. Since we're talking about things you can eat during a power outage, let me give you my top five beans and then the recipes or some recipes that go along with those beans. Number one, black beans. Chewy, smoky, turn them into burgers or chili, piece of cake. Number two, pinto refried beans, dirt cheap, but they taste great. Third, kidney beans. They're hefty, they're iron loaded, and you can put them in stew. Four, chickpeas, mash them up, roast them, very kid friendly. Five, navy beans, the old standby. Here's a couple of recipes. First, let's talk about black bean burgers. And I like black beans, I'm a carnivore, but I really like black bean burgers. So the black beans, two cans, don't rinse them, save the starch, egg or a flax binder, breadcrumbs, garlic, cumin, chopped onion, patty them up, fry for five minutes on each side. Buns are optional, 20 grams of protein, and it doesn't really taste like you're eating beans. Okay, then my bunker chili. The same beans. We've got the black beans, kidney beans, two cans of tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic powder, chili powder, a lot of cumin. And as you can see, there's no fresh veggies. If you have some onions or green peppers, you can always toss those in. Simmer for about 20 minutes and smash half a can of beans against the pot wall while it's cooking. It feeds four, a lot of protein. And if you have some rice, put rice on top of it, and it is fantastic. All right, folks, I appreciate everybody stopping by. And again, I'm not going to talk about politics. I'm not going to talk about the race for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general here in Virginia. Like most elections, there's been a lot of mud slinging, a lot of finger pointing, as usual. All right, folks, thanks again. And as always, take care of one another. Be careful out there. And until next time.

SPEAKER_00: 17:03

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