We have lots of wood--about 3 cords already cut and dried and 4 trees that have died and need to come down. We have about 1.5-2 acres of woods. And a woodburning stove, of course.

We have a propane heater/stove and 3-4 25lb tanks. We learned (the hard way) that the big (what is it? 100lbs) tanks are not so efficient. They run out of pressure when they are only 2/3-3/4 used.

We bought a fuel tank at an auction for $15. It's divided into two 60-gal sections. We have a handpump for that that. It gets rotated every fall. I dread to see how much it will cost this fall. And then another 15 or so 5gal tanks. If we use our Geo exclusively, we have about an 8wk supply of gas to get us into town, to work, etc. For those that have the space, I encourage you to look to buy a tank at farm auctions. For one thing it take a LOT less space than 5gal containers.

We also have a dual-heat furnace so if power goes out we can use the oil. We have 200 gal of oil.

11 yrs ago when we had the worst flooding in written history, we had a 2 day ice storm that left us without power for 10 days. It showed us how much we needed to do to be prepared. So that summer when we wired the garage, we also put in a double-throw box. So we can plug in the generator in at the garage and then it goes into the house through the main power line. That way we can run both 110v and 220v appliances. We really put our preparedness planning to the test when another ice storm left us without power for 3 days. We did really well--only lacking batteries for a couple flashlights.