A couple of us have been trying to puzzle this out since seeing the movie The Day After Tomorrow (they write off everyone north of the middle of the country during an ice-age): if you had no heat source, would you freeze to death in your home during a typical New England winter?
These are the conditions we’re talking about:
Where you live the daily high temp averages range from:
November 55F to 43F
December 43F to 34F
January 33F to 34F
February 40F to 36F
March 51F to 41F
And daily lows:
November 34F to 25F
December 25F to 15F
January 15F to 12F
February 20F to 12F
March 40F to 30F
No heat source = no natural gas/oil/coal etc OR fires. Obviously you’d wear clothes and use blankets.
The house in question would have a typical amount of insulation for a house in the area, and average windows, both of which were picked with the assumption that you would have a way to heat the house, but for some reason you don’t. You don’t get to add more, but you can put plastic over the windows like you do other winters.
You would go about your daily activities going in and out of your home as necessary (for work, to get groceries and such) rather than sealing yourself into the house.
One theory is that as you went in and out of the house, you’d make it gradually colder in the house because the colder air outside would follow you into the house on very cold days. True or false?
If you were going to freeze to death in these conditions, when would people start to do so? How far north could you get away with not heating a home at all? There’s probably a terrible TV movie plot in the answers
It could happen, but a lot of people would survive. I’ve been hunting in New England during the winter, and was out all day and into the night before. It was cold, but I’d be hard pressed to imagine myself dying from it.
And of course in real life it’s almost inconceivable there would be no source of heat. Many homes have chimneys, and even if you can no longer go to the store to buy wood you can rip apart household objects, even parts of the house itself to use as fuel.
During the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 many people faced similar prospects. It was estimated that several thousand would die if throughout the North if the strike wasn’t called off, but it certainly wasn’t considered a death sentence not to have coal. In general it would have been the elderly and the very young who would die, most able bodied persons would have found some source of heating their homes or would have been able to tough through a lot of it.
Don’t forget that one ALWAYS carries a heat source of 98 degrees or so. Place yourself in a moderately insulated room that’s not too big and your own body will bring the temperature up to a non-freezing level. You just can’t do it for the whole house.
Well, consider that people do pretty well winter camping by bundling up and sleeping in down sleeping bags. One tends not to have a heat source in a tent, and a tent is pretty much non-insulated. And in the Olde Days in New England, bedrooms weren’t necessarily heated, you’d just have a warming pan for the sheets to make that first dive under the sheets tolerable. Then you’d burrow under a mound of blankets and down comforters.
So for normal, non-extreme conditions, people can do OK for a while without heat. However it wouldn’t be pleasant, and in a prolonged period of below freezing temperatures (let’s say, a period of -10F - 0 degree weather, you’d have trouble acquiring water (pipes and standing water would freeze). Food would be an issue too, as you’d have to eat a ton of calories to generate heat.
A daily average low of 12 degrees in January? Sign me up!
My apartment last year was in a town that is often the coldest spot in the lower 48 states. I had days that were thirty below before windchill…and there was always wind. Even now I still live in a cold place, and I suspect the average low for Jan is closer to zero than twelve. So in that apartment, yeah, I could seesoemone dying. Hell, even in my current one. It might not get as cold, but it still gets cold here, and this apartment has poor insulation, I’m just lucky that I can crank the heat up as high as I want and not pay for it.
I think it would be equivalent to cold-weather camping. Your house isn’t going to be much warmer than the outdoor temperatures without heat for long periods of time. My circa 1760 house happens to be under construction to repair severe a severe tree strike right now and I can assure you that it is just about as cold inside as outside. The main difference between temperatures is the fact that some windows get sun during the day.
That said, the Inuit and others do fine in very cold temperatures. Warm clothing can keep you from actually freezing to death although it would be quite uncomfortable for people not used to the conditions. We a have a 100 pound Samoyed and I suppose we could use him as a biological heat blanket while sleeping just like the Samoyed people in Siberia did. I don’t think that body heat alone would keep a house much warmer at all although sun facing windows might make a big difference. However, cold weather skills would mean that few people are at risk for freezing to death unless temperatures drop well below zero. Infants and the very old might have a tough time but it has definitely been done before.
My home does not have a chimney. I don’t know how I would safely build and maintain a fire inside it without risking burning the whole thing down and/or dying of carbon monoxide inhalation.
Winters here are also significantly colder than the ‘Typical New England Winter’ mentioned above. During a cold spell, it might max out at -20F for weeks on end and get down to -60F at night. Windchill might knock 20 or so degrees off of whatever the ‘offical’ temperature is, although my house is pretty well windproofed.
I have plenty of warm clothes and thick quilts and sleeping bags and I know how to layer. However, -60F is -60F and it is difficult to stay warm even if you’re in the sun and there is no significant wind. (A windless day here happens, but it is fairly rare for there to not be a breeze of some strength.)
I’m going to say that during a cold winter, it is possible to die in an unheated house where I live.
Daily lows do drop to zero, and even lower, from December to February and sometimes even February. Why, just two weeks ago we had a cold front and it was 3 degrees one morning, 7 the next.
Many of the old houses around here do not have insulation. Yes, you can read that again. Amazing, isn’t it?
Why couldn’t I light a fire? Damn, if I don’t have heat, I sure as hell am going to get a wood stove and light a fire. i can channel it out of the window or something, but there’s no way I’d want to live here as is.
However, I could probably live, as I live in an apartment complex, and there’s lots of other apartments around, so it’s a bit more shielded. Still, we only have two floors, we’re not in a big building. But I imagine houses would do worse.
If you have no heat whatsoever, then the temperature inside your home will
nearly average the average temperature outside. Your body heat won’t be much
of a factor, and even less value as you will presumably be trying to trap heat by clothing and blankets.
Our climate is colder than what the OP lists, and my Dad tells me that when he was a kid, his bedroom was in the unheated, enclosed porch in the front of the house (his family was very poor.) I think he would have preferred some heat, but he didn’t die from the cold. You can stay pretty toasty with a couple blankets.
On the other hand, your general health and age counts for a lot. A healthy teenager/adult can do a lot better in the cold than a small child or senior citizen. Shelter means a lot, too. Left outside in the cold overnight? In my area, you’re risking your life. In an unheated cabin? You’ll probably be fine, albeit a bit chilly.
As someone else pointed out, remember that you are your own heat source. If your house is sufficiently small and well-insulated, your body heat will keep the space sufficiently warm that you will not freeze. If there are additional people or animals in the house, the space may in fact be comfortably toasty.
For example, I spend a good amount of time in an unheated but insulated barn full of horses. The temperature stays well above freezing when the outside temperature is in the range described in the OP. A human being who takes minimal cold-weather management measures will remain comfortable, healthy, and alive in that space.
Now, the OP points out that the house in question was built on the assumption that there WILL be a heat source. If it’s like many of the houses up here, it is NOT well-insulated (probably not as well insulated as that barn) and it’s too big for one person’s body to keep warm. Also, the frequent coming and going of the inhabitants also might not consitutute good cold-weather management behavior (although most older houses out here have a sort of two-door air lock arrangement on one or more entrances, which mitigates heat loss). If you were to find a small interior room and limit your indoor activities to that space, you might do OK with appropriate cold-weather clothing.
People have survived cobbeling together crude fireplaces for centuries and somehow survived - up to code does not equal you will die or your house will burn down. I admit that many don’t have the best skills on emergency home heating and there will be accidents early on, but people will learn.
The more modern/better insulated the house the worse a home made fireplace will become as it will be tighter and allow less room for error.
In such a global emergency I would assume electricity will also be non-existant, so that means no running water for most (99.99%) so pipes freezing will happen but be a non-issue.
I would wag that people will use maerials on hand, including other parts of their house, to make a smaller ‘home within a home’ which would be heated by a fire (most likelely wood)., as there is a great amount of wood in in those woods, so unless the temps dropped another 40 degreese or so I don’t seem much of a problem in terms of the low temps causing a total dieoff. Food would be a bigger issue, and would be the limiting factor IMHO.
Yeah, that was gonna be my comment. For your body to be a good heat source, you’d also need adequate food for the whole winter. If you had a catastrophic power/infrastructure failure, I think food would be a huge issue.
I’m not sure if the data I used is completely inaccurate, or they’ve calculated the averages for a couple hundred years and there were some really warm winters in the past, because I myself find it extremely hard to believe that there is no day during the winter here that the average daily high is below freezing. There are weeks at a time that it doesn’t get as high as the 20s during the day, so either things have changed or weather.com is screwy. Still, their numbers are probably more accurate than me suggesting the average temperature is [picks two numbers that sound good].
And you can’t have a fire because it’s a heat source (yes, I realize most people not too stupid to live would really have a fire in this situation). You can make up a reason why you wouldn’t be able to burn anything, but I just want to know if given a set of circumstances a completely unheated house is survivable, and allowing a fire as a variable mucks that up.
I was told by a professor in college (not the best cite, I know) that most serfs in the early middle ages did not use fire to theat their homes: there simply wasn’t time to chop firewood (and in some places, not enough wood avalible) in quanities greater than what was used for cooking. Dung fires were not an option because it was a valuble fertilizer and not that many animals were wintered over. Winters in Germany are harsh: apparently people survived by having small shelters and sleeping with the livestock.
So: 1) how do you survive when there’s an electric blackout after a storm?
And: 2) how did your grandparents survive in your city, say, 95 years ago?
Yes, I know some of the answers–that the electric heat usually gets restored within a day, and in your grandparents generation they burned wood in the fireplace.
But–sometimes the power in a certain neighborhood remains out for a long time, and sometimes your grandparents couldnt get out of the house to haul wood.
Have you ever read the Ernest Shakleton stories of history multi-year unplanned stay in the Antactic region? None of his crew died and the conditions were WAYYY more harsh than you describe. They didn’t have fire during most of it. You can keep yourself warm during the day just by lots of activity. People do that recreationally in Northern New England all the time. I am Southern born and bred and even I have gotten used to it. The only time to worry is at night and then people can sleep together. Light clothes and close contact are recommended. Pile the whole family in the same bed and you will be hot within a couple of hours.
