"I need to trim those wicks," he said as he looked at the candles here and there through the room. "I need to keep them burning as long as I can."
How long had it been since they were plunged into darkness? A week? Two? He hadn't kept track.
The blizzard had raged for days. Eventually, his batteries had dwindled. The solar chargers wouldn't work if the sun didn't come out.
He did still have heat, though.
Thankfully, he had all the parts laying around to improvise a power source for the furnace. Someone had given him a deep cycle battery for some reason a year or so ago. He had pulled the 1500 watt inverter off his boat that was only used to charge his phone and radios. He also pulled the alternator off that old Chevy truck in the shed. The alternator was a 10-SI that had never been modified other than changing the voltage regulator to a single wire setup. It only produced about 60 amps and that was good enough to charge a battery.
He took his old ten speed bike and rigged up something so the back wheel would turn the alternator to charge the battery.
Rigging up the furnace was no big deal.
He took the cover off and disconnected the switch on the side and wired an extension cord to it after cutting off the female end and stripping the wires. He wire nutted and taped everything so there would be no arcs when he plugged it into the inverter.
He plugged it in and flipped the switch on the inverter. After about 15 seconds, the furnace fan kicked on. The glow plug igniter turned red, then orange, then yellow. The gas solenoid opened up and he had fire.
"Fantastic!"
He didn't know how long the battery and inverter would run the furnace, but he'd heard it would for a couple of days.
He decided not to chance it and would ride his bicycle to charge the battery in the morning and evening for about an hour.
He was glad he had propane.
The freezer was off, so he put everything outside in a wooden box on the back porch.
His water pump was off, too, but it was in the basement and his lines wouldn't freeze. He did have a hand pump attached to it, so there was that.
So the next few days or month or whatever it took to get the power back on wouldn't be fun, but they'd be tolerable.
"I'm getting a dual fuel generator in the spring," he thought as he climbed on his bike.