Emergency Preparedness You Don't Need a Generator The One in Your Driveway Will Do

Emergency preparedness for a winter power outage does not have to mean buying a generator, because the pickup in your driveway can run your furnace for about two hundred dollars in parts. Every ice storm up here, somebody's furnace sits full of propane and will not run. Most folks do not know why until the house is already cooling a degree an hour. The furnace cannot light its fire or turn its blower without electricity, and the lines out our way can stay down for a week. So today I am going to show you exactly how to hook it up, step by step. By the end of this video you will know why a full furnace goes cold and how to read its label to find your own wattage. You will know why a pure sine wave inverter is the only thing you need to buy, and how to clamp it to the battery posts instead of the dash socket. You will learn what an idling truck can actually carry: the furnace, the chest freezer, the fridge, and a few lights. You will see the five-dollar outlet that lets your furnace plug into a cord in ten seconds, and how heating in shifts with a deep-cycle battery makes one tank of gas last six or seven days. That is how our family went six days without power three winters back, and the house never dropped below sixty. I will be honest with you the whole way. That engine puts out carbon monoxide, and I will show you exactly how to run the truck so it never reaches your family: outside in the open driveway, never in the garage, the tailpipe clear of snow, the cord coming in on the far side of the house, and a twenty-five-dollar battery alarm on every sleeping floor. My granddad loaded coal for thirty-one years, and the miners carried canaries for a reason. I will also tell you why you must never push power back through a dryer outlet, because the lineman in that bucket truck might be your neighbor's boy. And have a licensed electrician put in the outlet. This is not hard. Anyone with common sense and a Saturday morning can set it up and test it before the first cold snap. A word of honesty: this is not a whole-house generator. An idling truck will not run a 240-volt well pump, a heat pump, or electric baseboard heat, and the deep-cycle battery will carry the fridge and lights through the night but not the furnace. If your heat is all electric, I show you how to shrink the house down to one warm room instead. Know what it is for, set it up for that, and it will get your family through every ice storm these mountains throw at you. Tell me in the comments — go look behind your furnace today, did you find a plug or just a switch? And if you have already ridden out a long outage, tell the beginners the longest you have gone without power where you live and the one thing you wish you had ready. I read every single one. Next time, since you now know how to keep the furnace running when the lines go down, I am going to show you how to build a heater that runs nearly free all winter long — because the cheapest heat is the kind that cuts your bill every day, not just during a storm. Subscribe so you do not miss it. Keep the truck outside, test that alarm tonight, fill the tank before the ice, and remember — the folks who built these mountains into home knew things we're only just starting to learn again. #EmergencyPreparedness #PowerOutage #DisasterPreparedness #Homesteading #Prepping #Appalachian #Prepper #Generator #Inverter #GridDown #EmergencyPower #PowerOutagePreparedness #EmergencyHeating #WinterPowerOutage #OffGrid