If your furnace quit at your personal home with no other source of heat, how cold would it have to get inside before you and your family rented a motel for the night?

I frequently hear people saying that they have to stay in a motel because something is wrong at their house, but I've never done it in my entire life. Maybe I've just been fortunate that I haven't had any "real emergencies."

Given where I live it is highly unlikely for it to get cold enough for me to spend the money on a hotel when I have blankets and long sleeve shirts.

We live in Hurricane Country so we have a generator, battery-powered lights and even the internet is hooked in to the generator when it's plugged in.

The thing is to be tough and be prepared. If you are, you will get by or find a way.

It was 2* at 11 am over here. When I zapped a screenshot to my tenant during our conversation, he countered with one that showed -2* at 8:30 am. Now, at almost-6pm, we're holding steady at 12*.

A tenant in one of my garage apartments texted me around 1, and said they had gotten a room at the local motel for the next day or two. His unit is all-electric, and we've been having rolling blackouts. He said his place was about 30* inside when they gave up... I don't know how he came to that number, because he also said it was 25* in the house, but he did say the water they had kept trickling in the bathroom had frozen in a little stream, and he could see his breath inside.

If my (gas) furnace quit, I would still have electricity and would use space heaters.

One in the laundry room, 1 in the bath blowing under the open vanity onto the one wet wall between the bath & kitchen, and one in my bedroom or living room - depending on the time of day.

That would probably work fine until the furnace could be fixed. However, to answer the question: Probably about 55 would make me unhappy. But, probably wouldn't go to a motel unless it got to about 50.

Down here if the power goes out, it goes out for the motels too! During a city wide power failure, the only place that can manage to stay open is Waffle House, which stays open 24/7 anyway. At least you won't starve to death.

I also burn wood and have a kerosene heater with 15 gallons of fuel ready to go. 2 large water tanks from water prepared D O T C O M giving us about 400 gallons of emergency water. You can melt snow to fill toilets and we also have emergency water filtration to filter water if needed. An unused 3 gallon pump sprayer rigged to a kitchen faucet dish sprayer to fill with warm water if we need an emergency shower.

Months worth of regular food. Month and a half of mountain house dehydrated foot and a few weeks of life raft food.

Told my wife if we're ever eating that garbage its apocalypse time.

Our furnace is gas, but still requires electric for the motor and electronics, of course. So, when we've been without heat, it's always been because the power was out for an extended period.

We have a generator so I can fire that up and bring the furnace back on in most cases.

Like NE, we also have weeks/months worth of "food storage" (dehydrated) in the basement -- so we could live on that for quite a while if we really couldn't go anywhere.

And, of course, piles of my Boy Scout stuff as far as other equipment goes (sleeping bags and so on).

- John...

In our late twenties we went 5 years without a working furnace to fund new furnaces for our rentals, and it got -25 cold at times. It was so cold I remember some of my husband's coworkers quitting for good mid-day; the UPS package cars had no heat at that time. We did have space heaters that we used in the morning to get ready for work.

We live in the same duplex we've lived in since then. We didn't have to worry about the pipes because they are heavily insulated.

We now have heated blankets, not so in our 20's. But Razorback said "no other source of heat" so we'd try to tough it out. We have sleeping bags and can still fit in one together or zip them together with loads of blankets inside and on top.

Where I live there was a big blizzard/ice storm in a nearby county and many had no electricity for nearly 3 weeks. Life went primitive fast and people were hiking to nearby ponds and streams with axes and buckets to get enough water to flush toilets. They could not cook food.

This story shook me up and the year before I had moved onto the farm I bought at auction in 2003. The wind on my farm is horrible, nothing stays put and I got so mad about it that one day I decided to put up a wind turbine and turn a lemon into lemonade. That led to me sizing and designing a hybrid solar-wind energy system with the goal of electric independence. The system went online in 2006, and I am now on my third battery bank. I also put in a LP cook stove with no electricity and installed a wood stove and wall furnaces. In 2011, I had a new LP central furnace put in, but it never worked right. I do not use a dish washer or a dryer and I have really slimmed my energy use.

1. In case of an emergency, I have made up a tri-fuel generator that operates on either gasoline, propane or natural gas. I have 30 pound tanks of propane that will fuel the generator at half load for 20 hours. I can use space heaters, heating blankets or power my furnace.

I also have a fireplace with a heat exchanger.

Finally I have a Mr. Big Buddy propane indoors propane heater...with an oxygen cut off sensor.

As others have said, I would most likely tough it out until things got dangerous....and having been a Boy Scout camping outside in a tent when it was 10 degrees, "dangerous" is very much in the eye of the beholder.

All of us have "mummy" style sleeping bags rates to zero degrees at least. Mine goes down to -25. I also have an arctic zone coat rated to 0 degrees, and when I was shoveling the driveway yesterday I was sweating profusely and got so warm I had to stop for awhile to cool down. All this to say, I am accustom to dealing with cold and am personally well-prepared.

So to protect my home and pipes, I would likely stay put until it got below 10 degrees inside, which would take a very long time of prolonged arctic weather. Might get a hotel room for the wife and kids since they aren't as accustomed to dealing with cold as I am.

I had a tenant text me this morning that the furnace had something wrong with it because it was only getting up to 67 degrees in their unit even though they had it set on 77. They were going to go sit in their car with the heater running. Um, dear tenant, it's -10 outside. Not only is the furnace keeping up VERY well considering the conditions, but you're going to risk running low on gas and getting condensation in your fuel tank and lines which will then freeze and crack. But I cannot explain these things in a way they will listen.

We lost power several times when the kids were still at home. Sometimes the power was out for as long as a week.

We were an active Boy Scout family and did a lot of winter hiking and camping.

When the power went out, the kids slept in their sleeping bags.

We are on city water and the kids kept the fireplace going. Even though the fireplace is designed for looks and not heat, it did keep the pipes from freezing.

The kids cooked on the fireplace, camp stoves, and backpacking stoves. We also had plenty of coleman lanterns.

The power outage was a big adventure for the kids!

Now that the kids have left, we have a portable generator that will run most of the house.

Sid, makes you wonder what your tenant and so many others like her will do if something really bad actually happens.

Sid's story of the tenant expecting the house to be 77 degrees is a perfect example of what prompted my post.

In the immediate town that I live in, there is no natural gas. I'm guessing that the houses are pretty close to a 50/50 split of heat pumps and propane, although I could be off. There are a couple of community Facebook groups I'm in and I could not believe the number of people who are freaking out that their heat pump can't keep their house at 72-77 degrees in weather with high temps below 10. My only thought is what will these people do if we do wind up with rolling blackouts?

The common theme through everyone's response was be prepared and adapt. I guess thinking ahead is outside the realm of possibility for many.

Oh Tim, those heat pumps are why you're seeing the freak outs. When we have them installed here, the installation guys ALWAYS tell us that they good down to a certain temp, after that they simply don't work to maintain temps. I think it had to do with the way the machine pulls heat out of the air. (Think AC working in reverse).

Good topic, Tim! Most of our power outages here in SE Pennsylvania happen during hurricane season, when heat is not much of an issue.

We did have a four-day outage after an ice storm about 7 years ago. Our wood-burning insert kept radiating out heat, and hubby was well-prepared with wood. We used a generator (again, hubby had plenty of gas) to run the wood stove's fan, the refrigerator, the freezer, and the well pump. I think we even were able to run our propane furnace a bit during the last two days - but never at night, as we won't run a portable generator unattended. We're campers, so we have plenty of sleeping bags to pile on (learned to do that after being in Yellowstone one July when the temps dipped to 36F!). Our less-prepared neighbors did have to leave for hotels in the next county, and several had pipes freeze. They all suddenly began purchasing Generacs and portable generators.

We never left - the temps outside were around 25F, but the upstairs bedrooms only got down to 52F on the day that the power was restored. If the power hadn't been restored, we would have all piled into the room with the wood stove for an overnight camp-in. (We went out that morning to church, and returned to find our youngest daughter, who had entered the house first, hugging a lit electric lamp.)