How we should survive the winter

If this personally does not concern you, please read a little further, it might come in handy for your friends who are not so lucky. The fact is that although the Internet is full of tips on this subject, the vast majority of them are either hidden advertising or leisure opinions on particular cases. I want to help survive the winter to those who really need it.

To begin with, we are all in different conditions. In the destroyed territories, winter is a matter of life and death, in prosperous cities - just the problem of comfort. But the townspeople are scared that the boiler room or substation can be attacked, leaving the house without heat, electricity, gas, or everything together. The smallest risks are in private houses, but a rare household can do with firewood and splinters only: heating, ventilation, water supply, and sewage require energy from the outside. Therefore, discussing preparations for the winter, everyone should define the risks to play up and the level of comfort that is possible to go down with. The “size” of the solution depends on this, and so do its reliability and cost. For example, if all energy carriers disappear, the best solution is likely to go to where they are. But if this is not possible, you need to look for the best solution out of the worst ones. So let's take a look at two classes of solutions: “survive until spring” and “provide at least a minimum of amenities”.

I’ll make a note right away: forget about advertising. Warming materials, heating devices, and energy carriers differ little from each other and there is nothing among them that can bring radical benefits, especially in conditions of a shortage of time and money. The differences between one from the other are measured by percent, so you will spend money and won’t feel the difference. You can make a mistake, for example, having bought electric radiators: since many people will do this, the electricity in the entrance will be constantly knocked out and attempts to agree among neighbors might not be very fruitful. Pasting over the outer walls with German foam and replacement of double-glazed windows with others won’t bring the desired effect either. You do not need a battery with an inverter: you can hold out for a day on it, and then it all depends on whether the electricity will appear on the network. You can charge a mobile phone and a computer, but we can’t be sure that there will still be a connection and the internet.

To search for good solutions, common sense and understanding of the essence of the “balance” are needed. The figure above shows the equality of the sums of incoming and outgoing flows. In order to reduce the need for energy multiple times, you need to reduce losses multiple times, preferably for little money. To do this, you need to turn your imagination on and mentally “go out” outside of the apartment that stands in front of your eyes while you are thinking about how to warm up. You don’t need to think about how to heat the house and how to stock up on energy cheaper, but how to make sure that a little amount of firewood will be enough for the warming.

For those who have some energy carriers, I would offer a step solution: some measures for relative comfort, others for an emergency to survive if the energy disappears. The main technique is to eliminate the largest heat loss, not to heat the entire area, but only a relatively small place where you spend most of your time.

First, you need to do what everyone knows: carefully seal all the cracks, compact the doors, fix the vestibule in the entrance, and buy a backup source of heat. For a “daytime” life, determine one room for everyone, the closer to the kitchen the better, cause there is additional heat, separate it from other rooms and the corridor at least with the dense curtains. The smaller the room, the less heat it requires, so you can make, let’s say, a temporary firmware in the studio from whatever you have - tarpaulin, cardboard, plastic. You can make a blank for the partition and install it only when it becomes truly cold. You can replace the heating radiator by increasing the heat exchange area as much as possible - either dimensions or ribbing should be bigger. Find the ventilation holes through which the air comes in and out and think of how to adjust their cross-section - even a properly applied sheet of paper would work. In other rooms, heat can be turned off, but still, try to support some plus temperature. Most likely, they will not cool down without heating - heat flows from the neighbors through the floor, but if everyone would be doing the same, you will have to turn the heating on.

If it is still so cold that you are ready to go to further inconvenience, the next step is called “cocoon”. Imagine a tent installed in the apartment and the smaller it is, the less energy you need to warm up in it. The climber can live for several days in fierce frost in the tent, just warming up with a pair of liters of kerosene. The tent in the apartment will have enough heat from the body’s temperature and an ordinary candle. But a very important point is that the sides of the tent must be quite dense, they should not have cracks and gaps, and the insides are glued with something reflecting heat. No need to laugh about the “tinfoil hat”, the guarantor of the effect is school physics. Come up with options yourself, for example, a membrane made of porous polyethylene with aluminum spraying, out of which you can make a “box” with different configurations. You can build not only a tent inside the room but also something like an “inner room” - for example, from the cardboard pasted with the kitchen foil and fastened with the tape so that the cold air does not go through. The main thing is that between the main and the new wall there should be a gap left of at least a couple of centimeters. The radiator and household appliances should remain “inside” the new room to use their warmth, and the main things must be kept at hand so the warmth isn’t lost through the door if you are going back and forth. Behind the radiator, you also need to stick a reflecting canvas from something, at least just from the foil.

Of course, the “tent” should be done in the bedroom, using the heat of two bodies (plus a cat) and an electrical sheet as an energy source. The rich aristocrats have come up with this method a long time ago and called it the “alcove”. But it is necessary to remember that if your technological alcove is too small and dense, you risk suffocating in your own carbon dioxide (and don’t take plants there, they breathe oxygen at night). The same applies to a large room, the ventilation of which must be thought of separately.

The topic of ventilation is especially relevant if, in case of heat and electricity loss you use a gas cylinder with a stove or a special heater. I have not yet figured out what to do here, but this is an emergency temporary option: a 50-liter cylinder is enough for a week during which you can wait for energy, or find where to go.

Consider the extreme case when everything is gone, and there is nowhere to go. The only way to save your life is to unite. I can hardly imagine a potbelly stove in each apartment of a high-rise building, it is extremely dangerous, and difficult technically, and it is unlikely that it would be possible to get enough firewood for each, even if cutting all the chestnuts in Kyiv. We must agree to revise the lifestyle until spring, accept the inconvenience, and find its own charm. The thing is, heating 5 families in one room is 15 times easier than in 5 apartments. You need to look at the space in advance where you can safely put a potbelly stove with a stock of firewood or coal, and a water tank for boiling and cooking simple food in large quantities. It can be an unfinished, abandoned building, or the basement of the building (if everything that can burn is taken out from it). It can be a tent in the yard for cooking and warming since it is quite convenient to sleep in the “alcove” of your own apartment. In the tent you can be on duty taking turns, keeping the fire and hot water, and maybe - cooking for everyone. But if you make a tent, make sure that there’s an air gap between the walls, as mentioned above.

Maybe what is written here in September looks wild and the sacred “it will work out somehow” will not let you turn this text into a call to action. God help that we won’t need it. But if you or your friends decide to help people who do need it  - here are ideas for starters. And if you need help - just contact someone, it will always be free for volunteers. By the way, you can also do warm autonomous “caskets” for the Armed Forces of Ukraine - small groups or even individual warriors in ambush, but you should add protection from thermal imagers.

A few tips on the particulars.

- The biggest problem with the potbelly stove is a huge heat loss through the chimney. You need to come up with a design to make a chimney part of the room, increasing its surface as much as possible. It can be a box with partitions, where the stream turns many times before getting to the pipe. Since such a design worsens the traction of the potbelly stove, the output pipe must be made higher. With the same box, you can combine ventilation by letting out the coming air along the box to heat up.

- Remember that warm air is always up, and cold air is down. It is better to make bunks on the second “floor” and reside there. In the army, we lived in a house from the roofing material at -55 degrees, heated by three potbelly stoves. There was always ice on the lower bunks, food was stored on them. It was pretty comfortable on the upper bunks, until the person on duty fell asleep. But if you throw a felt boot at him, he woke up and after 10 minutes it was warm again.

-It, it is better to do the ventilation output from below so as not to spend warm air. And the higher the ceiling, the more heat will not be available to you, it should be reduced using cardboard or tarpaulin.

And finally, how you should “read” the offers that promise an incredible benefit for a little money. It is impossible to fool physics with any tricks: you can’t extract more energy from the material than it is granted by nature. Data on the “heat-intensive ability” of different carriers is easy to find on the internet, but for many people, it’s too abstract. I suggest a simple approach on how to critically approach advertising.

Imagine a heating device that you are well familiar with - for example, an oil radiator. Compare its power in kilowatts with the volume of the room you used to warm it up with and then measure everything not in joules or kilocalories, but in such “radiators”. Divide the heating capacity of the fuel by the number of kilowatts in your radiator - and you will get a visual picture of how many hours the nominal “radiator” will work from this type of fuel. This is enough for rough calculations, and you can already clarify by reference books, price tags, shares, etc. And note that in the table below I cited the volumes and prices for a strongly “averaged” heat performance, which has a wide range and depends on the seller’s greed. In addition, calculations show the maximum case, as if fuel energy is 100% used for your needs. This does not happen, any device has an efficiency that depends on the method of energy production and the quality of the design. Therefore, the limiting values must be divided by efficiency, which will significantly raise the volume and cost of the material. Therefore, it turns out that a day of heating a room of 20 m2 with a gasoline generator, you need 9 liters of gasoline which is 450 UAH. It is possible to improve efficiency by placing the generator directly in a heated room with the exhaust outlet through a window. But, better or worse, it is still an impossible cost, which is suitable only for an emergency, short case.

And do not be deceived by the cheapness of electric heating. The price for people is kept artificially and can change at any time. The fact is that manufacturers receive electricity from the same carriers that are shown in the table, and the efficiency of converting energy into electricity does not exceed 35%.

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