Our gas range is not safe to use for heating, but it would let us cook or boil water even if the power were out. Other types of range / cooktop do not offer this.

When renovating our house, we added an externally-vented natural gas fireplace as a backup heat source. House already had a gas furnace, but that needs power for fans and to startup, so doesn't work without mains electric power.

Crucially, this gas fireplace has warming pipes and a small D-cell pack. The batteries power a small fan which can take cold air in from the room, heat it as it travels through the pipe in the fireplace, then exhaust the warmed air back into the room. The pipes keep clean room air separate from fireplace air. The batteries mean it can be started and run without any mains electric power.

Not sure of the model, but this capability must be available from several manufacturers. It was priced as a normal gas fireplace project, nothing special.

(We also improved insulation during the renovation, which makes the house more thermally stable, as well as cheaper to heat or cool.)

Another way to keep warm is to pile into a small tent placed on the bed, and cover the top with blankets.

Anonymous wrote:The DC area is less likely to have widespread outages from storms like that because we are accustomed to snow. In fact, we are having less snow lately rather than more.

Also, the power grid and tree canopy are better maintained than in Texas. That said, when our area loses power it generally is one part of it rather than the whole thing.

This. We have only lost power in the summer. Usually for less than a few minutes. The worst was a hyper localized outage of a few blocks from a giant tree that went down. But I went to a friends to work and charge my stuff. It was not a huge deal.

If you lost power, it’d be very unlikely you couldn’t get somewhere that did have power. But if you are really nervous, get a small heater that would run on batteries. You can seal a room and run that and it’d be enough until you could get out.