➡ With winter storms becoming more severe, it’s important to have a reliable alternative heating source. This article discusses various off-grid heating options, with a focus on propane space heaters. These heaters are portable, safe, and can be stored for many years. However, they require proper ventilation and careful use due to the risk of carbon monoxide.
➡ These heating units, perfect for emergencies, can run on small or large propane tanks for five to six hours. They come with adapters to connect different tank sizes, but the connection can be tricky. The units’ efficiency depends on the propane canister’s temperature, but a feature called ‘heat hog’ can increase efficiency by 30% by warming the canister. Remember, staying warm is crucial, especially in the wilderness during winter, and these units can be purchased at a discount from canadianpreparedness.com.

In light of the increasingly severe winter storms that are ravaging the east coast and the looming threat of fuel shortages, having a reliable alternative heating source is absolutely critical to ensuring you and your family’s survival. Today we’re going to share some options that will help you keep warm through the winter if the grid goes down. Let’s get to it. Okay, so winter is here. The winter storms are ravaging the east coast. Now we’re getting a lot of questions about winter heating options. I’ve done plenty of videos on the channel but I realized that we have a lot of new subscribers in the past year so I thought I would touch on this issue once again.

There’s several different types of off-grid heating options. Now most of them are going to be rather energy intensive. You’re going to need a wood stove. You’re going to need a passive solar energy source like the passive solar greenhouse. If you do plan on using electricity expect to use a lot of electricity. Maybe you have a more advanced geothermal setup like the one I have at my home but a good alternative solution to that is something that runs on a more dense form of fuel like propane, kerosene, or diesel. A great propane option that we found are these small space heaters.

They come in a variety of different makes and models. They’re portable. They’re also very safe and propane lasts a long time so you can put this in storage for many years and it’s not going to go bad like gasoline or diesel might. Now diesel and gasoline you can treat those fuels to make them last a bit longer but if you want to set it and forget its solution propane is going to be the way to go. Now I gotta say right out of the gates that the legalities for using one of these propane space heaters indoors differs depending on which country you’re in.

Here in Canada it’s actually prohibited to use these things indoors and to market them as such. Meanwhile in the United States the exact same product is perfectly legal to use indoors so the regulations are entirely different when you live in a big nanny state like the one we live in. There’s a good reason why there’s regulations around these things. Carbon monoxide will kill you and a byproduct of burning propane is carbon monoxide and there’s usually a lot of condensation buildup so for that reason you’re going to want to ventilate the space that you use these in.

So whether you’re in an ice fishing shack, an outdoor tent, an RV, whatever enclosure that you’re using this in it has to be well ventilated. The great thing with all of these units like these do have oxygen depletion sensors so that means when the oxygen in the room reaches a certain low level they’re going to automatically shut themselves off. If you wanted to go a step further get a carbon monoxide detector. Obviously you’re not going to want to leave this running in a place where you’re not there. That should go without saying proper discretion is required if you’re going to use these devices safely.

Where a lot of people run into problems with these things is in the ignition process. The instructions are written on the back of each one of these. Oftentimes people don’t follow the instructions exactly. You know, I’m guilty as charged. I don’t like reading instructions either. So this one has electronic ignition. That means it’s very convenient. However, unlike a piezo lighter that these ones have built in, it’s not going to work if the batteries are dead. But there’s always alternatives. You can light this manually with a lighter, preferably a barbecue lighter or something elongated that you can get in there.

With the piezo lighter options, obviously these are going to work in any condition for the lifetime of the product. So in terms of lighting these heat hogs, it’s really simple actually. It just requires a little bit of patience, especially if you’re lighting it for the first time. You want to clear all the air out of the lines and that means that you have to depress the propane valve for 30 seconds prior to pressing the ignition button. So I’m going to show you how that works on one of the larger units. So what we’re going to do in order to light this, it’s very simple.

So we’re going to turn it to the ignition setting and that’s the star setting right here. Turn on my propane of course. So I’m going to hold this down for about 30 seconds. What’s happening right now is that propane is slowly pushing that air out of the line, getting to the pilot light and oftentimes people will not hold it down long enough so it’s not going to work. So now we see the pilot light on. Now you don’t want to take your hand off the valve just yet. I would recommend holding it on there for about 5 to 10 seconds.

They actually say longer than that but usually that’s a sufficient amount of time. Okay now I can take that off. Now all I have to do is turn it to the required setting. There’s three settings. There’s a 5,000 BTU setting, a 9,000 BTU setting, and a 18,000 BTU setting. So now that’s going. That’s throwing off heat. The 18,000 BTU setting with the 10 pound tank, you’re probably going to get around 12 hours out of this thing. If you want to quadruple that time, you bring it down to 4,000 BTUs. This one’s the same thing so essentially you just depress it just like you did with the other one.

It’s important you do this for 30 seconds otherwise you might get frustrated wondering why it’s not going to start and we get a lot of phone calls from people who are confused and I don’t blame you because when I first started using the unit I was confused also and it’s simply because I didn’t follow the instructions. Okay so now I’ve been depressing it for a while. I’m just going to turn it and of course it doesn’t work so you might have to do it a couple times but as long as you keep depressing it the pilot light will stay on.

So what we’re trying to do is get that pilot light on. It’s on now. We’re going to keep depressing it for just a few more seconds just to make sure that gas is flowing. So there we go. So that one’s on. That sweet smell of propane burning. I love the smell of propane in the morning. All right last but not least we have the piglet they call it. The piglet option all you have is one on button. You don’t have a dial. You only have one setting and there’s an off button.

So for this one I believe we have to depress it first for a little bit for 30 seconds so now I can smell that propane. I’m going to light her up. There we go. We got the pilot light on. We’re going to hold it down for a little bit. This one can be a bit more finicky. So it is on now. There we go and right when you release it it comes on. There’s a caution hot warning sign on there for any of you Canadians out there who are too dumb to use this indoors.

However that all could change very soon I’m told. Apparently we may become the 51st state soon so maybe that means we’ll suddenly be smart enough to use propane heaters indoors. The government thinks we’re dumb. You know we’re too dumb to own guns. We’re too dumb to use heaters indoors. What else are we too dumb to do? Yeah we’re way too dumb for that. Having used and distributed a variety of different options from Mr. Heater to Flame King there’s just so much more in the design of these heat hogs that is superior to the competition in my personal opinion.

For starters they have a really sturdy base so the base is very wide. Oftentimes the base on some of these systems is a little unstable and so that can lead to potential tip overs which is not a problem because of course there is a tip over shut off. If you turn this to a certain degree it’s going to automatically shut off. Now that’s not going to affect the tilt feature and that’s one feature that these have that other heaters don’t have and that’s the ability to tilt to direct the heat to a certain angle.

Now that of course has its limitations because you’re probably thinking to yourself well doesn’t heat just rise and you would be 100% correct. That’s why I often will pair my heat hog or whatever sort of heating system I’m using even if I’m using a wood stove tent I bring one of these portable lithium fans so you can move that warm air throughout the room. The other cool features of this has a really solid grate on the front. It also has a curved plate and that just allows for better heat diffusion as well.

It has a really nice robust handle to it and those are just sort of the general features of these designs. There’s three sizes so there’s a 4000 BTU unit, a 9000 BTU unit and an 18000 BTU unit. A unit like this running on one of these small propane canisters would be perfect for a survival emergency heating option. This will last you about five to six hours if you’re using it constantly for a one pound propane tank. All three of these units can run on the one pound canisters but only these two units are made to work with the bigger propane tank so your five pound, your ten pound or the bigger twenty pound propane tanks those are the ones that you typically would use for a barbecue.

I’ll just show you exactly what sort of options that you have here to connect propane tanks. You do have a quick connect adapter here and you also have a swivel regulator so you can plug in one pound propane tanks into here or you can use this twenty pound to one pound connector which also works on five pound or ten pound propane tanks so you can either use the quick connect adapter or you can use this connector which is a little bit you know it’s one of those it doesn’t always go in that easy okay so sometimes you got to caress it a little bit.

The efficiency of the propane canister is going to depend on the temperature that the canister is at so if it’s really cold where you’re trying to use it you’re actually going to get less propane out of that canister now heat hog resolves this issue at least for the one pound canisters like this one here so the actual propane is contained within the heat hog the heat hog is storing some residual heat backwards into this chamber which is warming that propane tank that’s going to increase the efficiency I think they say by about 30% so you’re getting actually a lot more heat and BTUs out of a can of propane using one of these versus the competition if you’re going to be running this on high you’re only going to be getting about an hour and 15 minutes out of a small propane canister which is why you’re probably going to want to get something bigger at least a five or a 10 pound heat is no joke we take it for granted the first way that most people die in the wilderness is because of exposure not a lot of movies talk about that the one movie that actually depicts it well is the road okay the father and the son they spend half the movie just trying to keep warming it really does the topic justice so don’t underestimate the importance of having to stay warm make it a priority especially during the winter months if you guys have any questions about these units put them in the comment section below if you want to get one of these you can pick one up at canadianpreparedness.com and you can get 30% off if you use the code heat hog go and check it out thanks for watching guys take care canadian prep row the best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices no junk and no gimmicks use discount code prepping gear for 10% off don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive stay safe
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