how to prepare for a winter storm

Winter storms kill more people indirectly than directly. It's not the snow that gets you. It's the power outage that drops your house to 30 degrees at 3 AM. It's the pipes that burst and flood your basement while you're huddled under blankets. It's the carbon monoxide from the generator someone ran in the garage because they panicked.

Everything in a winter storm comes down to three things: heat, water, and power. Lose one and you're uncomfortable. Lose two and you're in trouble. Lose all three and you're in danger. This guide covers how to keep the triangle intact before, during, and after the storm hits.

before winter: the work that matters most

Everything on this list takes a Saturday. One Saturday in October or November, before the first freeze. That's all the time between "prepared" and "scrambling."

generator service

If you own a generator, service it now. Not when the forecast shows a winter storm. Now. Change the oil. Replace the spark plug if it's been more than a season. Check the air filter. Run it under load for 15 minutes to make sure it starts and holds steady. If it sputters or dies, you have time to fix it. In January, you don't.

If you're running a dual-fuel generator, test it on both fuels. Propane and gasoline have different behaviors in cold weather — gasoline can gel in extreme cold, and propane pressure drops as the tank gets cold. Know how your machine acts in the conditions you'll actually face.

If you don't own a generator yet, read my guide on the best portable generators. A 3,500-watt dual-fuel unit will run your furnace blower, fridge, and a few lights. That's enough to survive a week.

fuel: fill everything

If you heat with propane, get your tank filled above 50% before November. Propane delivery during a storm is either delayed or impossible. I schedule my fill for late October and never let it drop below 30% through March.

For generator fuel, keep at least 15 to 20 gallons of treated gasoline in approved containers. Use fuel stabilizer — untreated gas starts going bad within 30 days. With stabilizer, you get a year. Store it away from the house in a ventilated shed or detached garage.

If you're on a dual-fuel generator, keep a couple of 20-pound propane cylinders as backup. Propane doesn't degrade. It sits in the tank until you need it, which makes it the most forgiving fuel for emergency storage.

pipe insulation

This is the cheapest, highest-return prep you can do. Foam pipe insulation costs about $3 for a 6-foot section at any hardware store. Wrap every exposed pipe in your crawl space, basement, attic, and exterior walls. Pay special attention to:

• Pipes along exterior walls
• Pipes in unheated spaces — crawl spaces, attics, garages
• The water line from your well or meter to the house
• Any pipe that's frozen before (it will freeze again in the same spot)

If you want to go further, add heat tape to the most vulnerable runs. Heat tape uses electricity, so it won't help during a power outage, but it handles the 90% of freezing events that happen while you still have power. For the other 10%, read how to keep pipes from freezing without power.

emergency kit

Build one. Put it in one container. Know where it is. Mine sits in a plastic tote by the back door, and everyone in my family knows where it is.

For a winter storm, your kit needs the standard outage gear — flashlights, batteries, radio, first aid — plus cold-weather additions:

• Extra blankets and sleeping bags rated for cold temps
• Hand and toe warmers (the chemical kind — buy a box of 40, they're cheap)
• A camp stove or indoor-safe propane burner for heating water
• 5 gallons of drinking water per person (FEMA says 1 gallon/person/day for 3 days — I say more)
• Canned food and a manual can opener
• Battery-operated CO detector (non-negotiable if you'll burn anything for heat)
• Pipe repair clamp and plumber's tape for emergency leak stops

I put together a complete list in the power outage kit guide. Print it. Check things off. Don't wait.

when a storm is forecast: 48 to 24 hours out

The forecast says it's coming. You've got a day or two. Here's what to do with that time.

Top off all fuel. Fill the car. Fill the gas cans. If your propane tank is below 50%, call for an emergency delivery — some companies will still come with 24 hours notice. After that, you're on your own.

Charge everything. Phones, tablets, laptops, portable battery packs, rechargeable flashlights, rechargeable lanterns. If it has a battery, plug it in now. Your phone is your lifeline for utility updates and emergency communication. A fully charged laptop is also a phone charger — most laptops can charge a phone 5 to 8 times from their battery.

Fill water containers. Fill your bathtub. Fill every large pot, bucket, and container you have. This water is primarily for flushing toilets (about 1.6 gallons per flush) and basic washing. If you're on well water, you will have zero water when the power goes out — your well pump is electric. Fill containers while you still have pressure.

Keep your drinking water supply separate. Bottled water or food-grade jugs you filled and sealed.

Prep food you can eat cold or heat simply. Cook a large batch of something hearty — soup, chili, stew. It'll keep in a cold house for a couple of days and you can reheat it on a camp stove. Stock up on foods that don't need cooking: peanut butter, crackers, canned goods, dried fruit, granola bars.

Know your shutoff valves. Find your main water shutoff. If a pipe bursts during the storm, the first thing you need to do is stop the flow. Standing in a flooded basement at 3 AM trying to find a valve you've never touched is a nightmare I want you to avoid. Find it now. Tag it. Make sure it turns. If it's seized, call a plumber while they're still available.

Find your gas shutoff too, if you're on natural gas. Know where the valve is on your propane tank. These are the things you need to find in the dark, under stress, in a hurry.

Bring in firewood. If you have a fireplace or wood stove, bring at least 3 days' worth of wood inside or onto a covered porch. Digging through snow to find wood defeats the purpose. Stack it where you can reach it without going outside.

during the storm: heat is the priority

The storm is here. Snow is falling, wind is howling, maybe ice is accumulating on the power lines. You still have power. Here's how to use this time.

Keep the heat running. This is the single most important thing. Heat keeps your pipes from freezing. Frozen pipes lead to burst pipes. Burst pipes lead to flooding. Flooding in a house without power to run a pump is a catastrophe that costs thousands of dollars and weeks of repair. The entire cascade starts with letting the house get cold.

Set your thermostat to at least 65 degrees. If you're worried about fuel, 60 is the absolute minimum for pipe safety in a well-insulated house. In an older house with pipes in exterior walls, stay at 65 or higher.

Open cabinet doors under sinks. This lets warmer room air circulate around the pipes. Especially important for sinks on exterior walls.

Let faucets drip. A slow, steady drip from both hot and cold lines keeps water moving through the pipes. Moving water is much harder to freeze. Yes, it wastes a little water. A burst pipe wastes a lot more.

Minimize door openings. Every time you open an exterior door, you dump cold air into your house and the furnace has to work harder to recover. Consolidate trips outside. Use one door (preferably not the one facing the wind). If you have an attached garage, enter through it rather than directly from outside.

Close off unused rooms. If the storm takes out your power and you're heating with a fireplace or space heater, close the doors to bedrooms and bathrooms you're not using. Concentrate your heat in the space where your family will stay. One warm room is better than five cold ones.

if you lose power

This is what you prepared for. The grid went down. Here's the sequence.

generator startup

If you have a generator, now is the time. Follow the safe startup procedure:

1. Move the generator outside. At least 20 feet from any door, window, or vent. Exhaust pointing away from the house. Not in the garage. Not under the carport. Outside.
2. Check oil and fuel. Top off both.
3. Start it and let it warm up for 2 to 3 minutes before connecting any load.
4. Connect your furnace blower first. Heat is the priority. Your furnace runs on gas or propane, but the blower that pushes warm air through your ducts is electric. Without the blower, your furnace is useless.
5. Add the refrigerator next. Then lights, then phone charging.
6. Don't exceed your generator's capacity. If it bogs down, remove the last thing you plugged in.

If you're running a portable generator, you'll need heavy-duty extension cords rated for the wattage. Thin indoor cords overheat and start fires. Use 12-gauge or 10-gauge outdoor-rated cords.

For a full walkthrough, see what to do when the power goes out.

space heater safety

If you don't have a generator and your furnace is dead, you may turn to space heaters. The rules depend entirely on what kind you have.

Electric space heaters: Only useful if you have generator power. Keep them at least 3 feet from anything flammable. Never leave them unattended. Never use an extension cord with a space heater unless the cord is rated for the heater's full wattage — most aren't.

Indoor-rated propane heaters: Units like the Mr. Heater Buddy are designed for indoor use. They have oxygen depletion sensors and tip-over shutoffs. Crack a window in the room where you're using one. Run your CO detector. Follow the manufacturer's instructions exactly.

pipe protection without heat

If your house is cooling down and you can't maintain heat in every room, focus on the pipes.

• Open all cabinet doors under sinks
• Set every faucet to a slow drip — both hot and cold lines
• If you can heat one room, make it the room with the most plumbing (usually the kitchen or a central bathroom)
• Wrap exposed pipes in towels, blankets, or newspaper as temporary insulation
• If you know the temperature will drop below 20 outside and you can't keep the house above 40, consider shutting off the water main and draining the system to prevent burst pipes entirely

I wrote a complete guide on this: how to keep pipes from freezing without power. If you're in the middle of this right now, go read that page.

food safety timeline

Your fridge keeps food safe for about 4 hours if you keep the door closed. A full freezer holds for 24 to 48 hours. A half-full freezer gives you about 24 hours. Do not open either one to check. The cold air you let out doesn't come back.

In a winter storm, you have one advantage: the outside is a freezer. If temperatures outside are consistently below 32 degrees, you can move freezer items to a cooler on your porch or in the garage. Don't set food directly in the snow — animals will find it.

If you have a generator, running the fridge is priority two after the furnace blower. Even cycling the generator — 4 hours on, 2 hours off — is enough to keep the fridge cold.

For a detailed breakdown of what to keep and what to toss, see my guide on how long food lasts without power.

if the outage is extended: 24 hours and beyond

A 4-hour outage is an inconvenience. A 24-hour outage in a winter storm is an event. A 72-hour outage is a survival situation. Here's how to think about it as the hours stack up.

when to consider leaving

Leave if any of these are true:

• Indoor temperature has dropped below 40 degrees and you have no way to heat
• You have infants, elderly family members, or anyone with medical conditions that cold worsens
• You're out of fuel for your generator or heating source
• Someone in the house depends on electric medical equipment (oxygen concentrator, CPAP, etc.)
• Your pipes have already burst and the house is flooding

Leaving is not failure. It's the smart call. Go to a friend's house, a hotel, or a community warming center. Call your local emergency management office — they'll know where shelters are open. Make the call before the roads get worse, not after.

Before you leave: shut off the water main. If you can, drain the pipes by opening faucets. Turn the thermostat up so the furnace kicks on immediately if power returns while you're gone. These three steps minimize the damage an empty, cold house will sustain.

neighbor check-ins

Knock on doors. Especially the elderly neighbor who lives alone. Especially the family with the new baby. Especially anyone you know who relies on electric medical equipment. Don't assume someone else is checking. In a winter storm, people die in their own homes because nobody knocked.

This isn't charity. It's community infrastructure. Your neighbor might have a generator and be willing to run an extension cord to your fridge. You might have extra propane they need. Information flows between people, and in an extended outage, your neighbors are your best resource.

community resources

Most counties activate emergency resources during extended winter outages. Look for:

• Community warming centers (often at churches, community centers, schools)
• Red Cross shelters for multi-day events
• Utility company outage maps and estimated restoration times
• Local emergency management social media — often the fastest source of information

If you have cell service, text rather than call. Cell towers get overloaded during widespread outages, and texts use less bandwidth. Save your phone battery for communication, not scrolling.

fuel management

Do the math on what you have left. A typical portable generator burns 1 to 2 gallons per hour under moderate load. If you have 15 gallons, that's 8 to 15 hours of continuous runtime. You probably can't get more — gas stations need power to pump, and they may be down too.

Run the generator in cycles. Four hours on to keep the house warm and the fridge cold. Two hours off to conserve fuel. This extends your supply significantly. Your house has thermal mass — it takes hours to cool down, not minutes. Use that to your advantage.

after the storm

Power's back. Roads are clearing. Don't skip these steps.

Check your pipes. Walk the house. Look in the basement, crawl space, behind walls where pipes run. Look for wet spots, bulging walls, dripping. A pipe that froze and cracked may not leak until it thaws. This can happen hours or days after the storm passes. Catch it early.

Evaluate your food. If the power was out for more than 4 hours, open the fridge and check temperatures. Anything perishable that's been above 40 degrees for more than 2 hours — throw it away. When in doubt, throw it out.

Refuel and restock. Refill your gas cans and propane. Restock your emergency kit. Replace the batteries you used. Buy the things you wished you had. Do it now, while the memory is fresh. In six months you'll convince yourself you don't need to.

Write down what went wrong. Every storm teaches you something. Maybe your generator was too small for the furnace blower. Maybe you didn't have enough water stored. Maybe the pipe in the guest bathroom froze because you forgot to open that cabinet. Write it down. Fix it before next winter.

the prep checklist

Here's everything in one place. Print this. Tape it inside a cabinet door. Check it every October.

Before winter:

• Service your generator — oil, spark plug, air filter, test run
• Fill propane tank above 50%
• Store 15-20 gallons of treated gasoline
• Insulate exposed pipes in crawl spaces, attics, exterior walls
• Build or update your power outage kit
• Test your CO detectors and replace batteries
• Locate and tag your water and gas shutoff valves
• Stock 3+ days of shelf-stable food and water

When a storm is forecast:

• Top off vehicle fuel, generator fuel, propane
• Charge all devices and battery packs
• Fill bathtub and large containers with water
• Prep meals that can be eaten cold or reheated simply
• Bring firewood inside
• Verify shutoff valves are accessible and functional

During the storm:

• Keep heat running — 65 degrees minimum
• Open cabinet doors under sinks
• Drip faucets on exterior walls
• Minimize exterior door openings
• Close off unused rooms if heating capacity is limited

If you lose power:

• Start generator outdoors, 20+ feet from the house
• Furnace blower first, then fridge, then everything else
• Keep fridge and freezer doors closed
• Drip all faucets, open all sink cabinets
• Cycle generator if fuel is limited: 4 hours on, 2 hours off

For more on handling the outage itself, see what to do when the power goes out.

Browse all preparedness and power guides at the guides hub.