My furnace just broke, need advice for keeping the house warm.

burn all the books

My mom told me that when she was a kid they would heat bricks, wrap them in towels and keep them at the foot of the bed to keep the bed warm at night.
I was thinking there must be other things you could heat that would slowly radiate heat.

Not sure about the stove, but our power was out in WA state for over a week a couple years ago in winter. In open doorways were there are no doors, hang blankets in the door to completely close the openings. It will help keep heat in that room. That way you are only heating that room and not the rest of the house.

Do you have a tent? Set it up in the living room and hang out in there. Get some cans of Sterno ("canned heat"). One can will heat the whole tent to toasty warm within an hour and last for hours.

Good luck!

Gas fireplace?
Or Electric heaters!

Do not like your pipes freeze.

is this a situation that is going to last because you're broke? Or are you going to get it fixed tomorrow?

Worst thing to happen is burst water pipes. People can survive just fine with enough blankets. We don't need no stinking heat.

Get a bunch of rabbits in your basement...trap them and seal the cage.

You will feel the heat plus stew once in a while.

Does it matter if the whole house is warm, or just yourselves? If the latter, wear multiple layers of clothing: long johns, pants, t-shirt, hoodie, sweater, regular socks, ankle socks, winter socks, etc. And obviously keep the space heater near where you'll be sleeping.

^^These are good to do too

If you are referring to an electric kitchen stove/oven, it should be safe to run all night at medium heat so long as it is in good operating order, completely cleared off and the area around it moderately clean. Leave the oven door open, not just ajar.

If you are talking about a fake fireplace kind of stove or radiant heater, move it a bit away from the wall if you can, and make sure you have at least 3 feet between it and any fabric. Feel the back and bottom of the stove; these should be warm but not terribly hot. Feel also the power cord and outlet it attaches to. It can be warm, but should not be hot. If all of these things are true and it is in good operating condition, it should also be safe to run all night.

If you are still worried, let an adult sleep in the room with the stove as an early warning system. (Do you have operating smoke detectors?)

Large pots of water will radiate heat for a couple of hours.

Dry rice in pans can be heated in the oven and poured into pillowcases for bed warmers.

Remember to drip faucets if you think the house will freeze.

Candles can provide significant heat in small rooms, but should be in glass hurricanes or jars for safety. Use good sense with these.

Hopefully we will get the heat fixed soon, and it's only in the 20's where I live, so it's not that cold, but I just wondered if someone could come up with some ideas for radiating the heat that we already have.
I'm not just thinking to help myself but trying to come up with some ideas to help other people that might end up in the same situation if their furnace goes out this winter.

Large pots of water will radiate heat for a couple of hours.

Dry rice in pans can be heated in the oven and poured into pillowcases for bed warmers.

Thank you for the tip, I'll try the rice idea!

I've been meaning to build one of those clay pot deals, but never got around to it. But I imagine I could put clay pots on top of the stove's burners and get the same effect.

Read this:

Thread: Dr. Acula and Friends: Emergency Winter Prep Tips!!! (411)

Some great tips

Woke up plenty of times with no heat. Did not know it was off until I got out of bed and saw my breath. To the best of my knowledge I did not wake up dead. How do you think homeless do it?

the tent is a good idea. my plan is to ductape two space blankets to the inside to further keep the heat in. I've got a UCO Candlier that has 3 candles in it. I'll place it in an unused paint can to give it more stability. Should raise the inside temp by about 15*.

Thanks Dr. Ac! I see a lot of info that might help get through this.
I think I should have been more specific with my question though, basically I want to know how to keep radiating the heat I already have, so that I can finally shut off my stove and go to sleep. I don't think it's safe to leave my stove on all night and want to know what I could heat up on the stove that will continue to radiate heat.

If you run exhaust fan over stove with oven door open and heat about 400 it helps circulate the heat really well!

put your monitor in your shorts

My furnace stopped working. I unplugged the electrical connections to the control box and cleaned them with a little sandpaper. I plugged them back in and it was working again. Perhaps you have the same thing.

The inducer motor went out but the technician won't replace it because the heat exchanger has a big crack in it.
This isn't the first time I've been without heat, so I think I'll manage, but speaking from experience it's hard to live in the winter without heat so everybody here should have a plan in case your heat goes out in winter!

In October, the furnace gave out completely in a twenty-year-old 1500 square foot ranch house that I'm renting. It was going to (and did) take two weeks for the landlord's contractor to replace it, so I bought a $40 oil-filled electric radiator heating unit to use in the mean time. The house has a mostly open floor plan, so I placed the heater in the middle, kept all internal doors open, and ran it on the high 1500 watt setting. It kept the whole house at 68 to 70 degrees when it was in the 20's outside at night, and in the 30's during the day. It ran on high 24/7 for two straight weeks, at a cost of about 9 cents per hour. I didn't think that was too shabby.

The last time I didn't have heat I was 19 years old. We couldn't pay the gas bill until after Christmas. It was horrible. We closed off one room and tried to heat it with a space heater which doesn't do much when it gets really really cold. We used lots of blankets but it didn't help.
We wished we could have burned some wood or something but had no fireplace.
There must be a more efficient way to heat a house.

It's all a matter of BTUs. If you put something on the stove and heat it for 10 minutes it gives you 10 minutes worth of BTUs back, though possibly spread out over a slightly longer period of time depending on it's rate of thermal conductivity. No matter what. It gives you back the equivalent of having the stove on for 10 minutes. That's why heating things and using them as a heat sink can't work but over short periods of time, certainly not all night.

I'd say just move yourself into one small room with the space heater and seal it up as good as possible and ride it out there, even if you have to sleep on the floor.

Turn your OVEN on low and leave it.

I had kerosene heaters one in the back room

I didn't know those worked so well, I'll pick one up when I get a chance!

Along with the open floor plan, a couple things worked in our favor. The house is well-insulated, and our rural electric management power supplier is relatively cheap. Depending on your local electric provider, the hourly cost to run that heater at 1500 watts could be upwards of 16 cents per hour.