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I don’t know about you but experiencing the winter Ice storm of 2021 last February has me prepping for winter MUCH differently this year.
As a lifetime resident of the Coastal Bend I always have my hurricane kit and chemical emergency kit ready to go, but this year I realized that we would need to start having a more winterized kit handy too. The problem we ran into is that we always have expected to possibly be without power and hot; we were VERY unprepared for a power outage in the COLD!
As we near the cooler months I find myself looking forward to the lower temps, homemade soups, and cute sweaters. But I also find myself feeling anxious like never before about the winter months.
What if we have another freeze? What if we lose power? What if we lose water?
Our house was EXTREMELY lucky as we only lost power for a short period of time, unlike my parents in Kerrville who lost power for over a week and were snowed/iced into their neighborhood. It was so scary knowing that they were relying on wood scraps and a fireplace to keep them from freezing to death. Then wondering what we would do if we lost power since we have no fireplace or generator to run even the smallest of space heaters.
This year I want to be better prepared so I started doing a few things to prepare:
- Building up our food storage (I have been using this previous post 52 Weeks of Food Storage to help me)
- Building up our water storage (I am buying an extra case of water every other week and storing the extras)
- Stocking up on Hand and Feet Warmers
- Purchasing an Indoor Safe Propane Heater
- Purchasing a Heated Electric Throw Blanket with a rechargeable battery pack.
- Getting supplies to Make a Clay Pot Heater. There are a lot of different YouTube videos with different methods of this but the basics are tea lights, a small clay pot, and a larger clay pot, and you can use those to make a space heater for your home. This is a video I found where he used a muffin tin and the two pots and said that it worked really well.
While all together getting everything above would be a big dent in our family budget, because I have started now, I am getting things slowly and over time so that I can be prepared when the time comes, but not go over our normal weekly budget.
We would also like to get a larger generator that we can use to power larger items if we were to lose power in any type of emergency, and it is something that we hope to have in the next year!
How are you and your family prepping for winter this year? Will you change some things, stock up, or hope that the conditions from last year do not repeat themselves?
