A generator running quietly in a closed garage is one of the most dangerous machines a person can own. It's not the noise that hurts you, and it's not the fuel. It's the carbon monoxide — a gas you cannot see, cannot smell, and cannot taste, pouring out of that engine and seeping under the door into the house where your family is sleeping. Ready.gov puts it plainly: carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you, your family, and your pets. People die this way every single winter, and almost all of them thought they were being careful.
So here's the uncomfortable truth this section is built around. The dark isn't what hurts people in a power outage. The things people do to fight the dark and the cold — that's what hurts them. The generator, the camp stove, the gas oven cracked open for heat. The actual danger in an outage is almost always self-inflicted, and almost always preventable, if you know five things before the lights go out.
Start with the generator, because it's the deadliest item on the list and the one people get wrong most often. The rule from Ready.gov is short and absolute. Generators and fuel should always be used outdoors and at least twenty feet away from windows, doors, and attached garages. Read that again, because every word is load-bearing. Outdoors — not in the garage, not on a covered porch, not in a shed with the door open. Twenty feet — not five, not "far enough," twenty actual feet. And away from windows and doors, because carbon monoxide doesn't respect a wall. It drifts. It finds the gap under a door, the cracked bedroom window, the bathroom vent, and it pools inside the house while the machine hums along innocently outside.
This is the part that trips people up, so let's be clear about it. A garage with the big door rolled up is not "outdoors." People reason that the open door lets the fumes out — but carbon monoxide is heavier and sneakier than that, and an attached garage shares walls and gaps with your living space. An enclosed or partly enclosed space concentrates the gas fast. The only safe place for a running generator is out in the open air, well clear of the building, with the exhaust pointed away from it.
While we're on the generator, a few smaller rules that save lives and houses. Keep it dry and protected from rain or flooding — touching a wet generator, or a device plugged into one, can give you an electrical shock. Always connect it to your appliances with heavy-duty extension cords, not the flimsy ones from a junk drawer. And here's one people forget in the dark, fumbling and tired: let the generator cool down before you refuel it. Fuel spilled on a hot engine can ignite. So you're not just running the machine in the right spot — you're running it dry, letting it rest, and topping it off cold.
Now, since carbon monoxide is the thread running through all of this, you need a way to know it's there when you can't sense it yourself. That's what a carbon monoxide detector is for, and the guidance is specific. Install working CO detectors with battery backup, in central locations, on every level of your home. The battery backup matters more than anything else in that sentence — think about when carbon monoxide poisoning happens. It happens during outages, when the household has fired up a generator or a stove. A plug-in-only CO detector is dead exactly when you need it most. So the detector has to run on its own battery, independent of the grid that just failed.
Here's the part that's genuinely chilling, and worth knowing before you ever need it. Carbon monoxide poisoning feels like the flu, or like ordinary tiredness. The early symptoms — headache, dizziness, nausea, that heavy drowsy feeling — are exactly the kind of thing you'd shrug off on a cold, stressful night and try to sleep through. And sleeping through it is how it kills. So the gut-check is this: if several people in the house get headachy or sick at the same time, or if the symptoms ease when you step outside and come back when you go in — treat that as carbon monoxide until proven otherwise. Get everyone into fresh air and call for help. Don't reason with it. Don't lie down.
So if someone stopped you right here and asked the single most important rule of running a generator — what would you say? … Outdoors, twenty feet from the house, with a battery-powered CO detector on every floor as your backstop. Everything else is detail.
Now let's shift from the machine to the people who can't simply ride out an outage. This is the planning that has to happen before the power fails, because there's no improvising it in the moment. Take a single person who depends on an oxygen concentrator, or a home dialysis setup, or a CPAP machine, or insulin that has to stay cold. For that person, a power outage isn't an inconvenience. It's a medical emergency on a clock. Ready.gov's advice here is direct and worth following to the letter: talk to your medical provider, ahead of time, about a power outage plan for any device that runs on electricity and any medicine that needs refrigeration.
That conversation has two specific questions in it. First — how long can this medication safely sit at a warmer temperature, and what exactly do you do for any medication that's critical for life? Get that number from your pharmacist or doctor, because it's different for every drug. Second — what's the backup power for the device, and where do you go if it runs out? Ready.gov's blunt fallback for extreme heat or cold applies here too: go to a community location that still has power. Knowing which library, shelter, or community center near you keeps the lights on is part of the plan, not an afterthought. And on the medicine specifically, if the power's out for more than a day, the guidance is to discard refrigerated medication unless the label says otherwise — and call your doctor or pharmacist right away for a new supply. That's not waste. That's not gambling on a drug that may have gone bad.
Take inventory now, while it's easy. Walk through your home and list everything that depends on electricity to keep someone safe — the oxygen, the powered wheelchair, the refrigerated insulin, even the home phone, because many of them won't work in an outage and the battery backup only lasts so long. Then plan the alternative power for each one: a charged power bank, a car charger, a generator sized for the device. The inventory is the boring part. It's also the part that turns a frightening night into a managed one.
Now, heat and cold — because this is where the second wave of bad decisions happens, after the generator. When the furnace dies and the house starts dropping, people reach for whatever burns. And here's the rule that has to override every cold-night instinct you have: never use a gas stovetop or oven to heat your home. Ready.gov is explicit that this raises your risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, and it adds the risk of fire and burns on top of that. The same goes for camp stoves and charcoal grills — those belong outdoors, at least twenty feet from windows, same as the generator. Anything designed to burn fuel for cooking outside will quietly fill an enclosed room with the same invisible gas. The kitchen oven feels safe because it's familiar. It isn't.
So what do you actually do when it's cold and the heat is gone? Layer up before you're cold, not after — clothing, blankets, sleeping bags hold the heat your body's already making. Close off the rooms you're not using and gather everyone into one space to share warmth. And if the cold or the heat turns genuinely dangerous, don't tough it out at home. Go to one of those community locations with power that you scouted ahead of time. The same logic runs in summer: in extreme heat, the move isn't a jury-rigged cooling system, it's getting to a place that's already cool. Surviving an outage safely sometimes means leaving the house, and there's nothing weak about that.
There's one more hazard, and it doesn't strike during the outage — it strikes the instant the power comes back. When the grid flips on, it often returns with a momentary surge or spike, a jolt of voltage that can fry electronics and appliances that were sitting there plugged in. So the move, early in the outage, is to turn off or unplug your sensitive equipment — the computers, the TV, the microwave, the things with delicate circuit boards. Leave one lamp switched on so you'll know the moment power returns, then plug everything back in once it's steady. This is the rare piece of outage advice that's about protecting your stuff rather than your body, and it's the one people skip — right up until the refrigerator's control board dies on the surge and the repair costs more than a year of caution would have.
There's a quiet edge here that working electricians and emergency planners agree on but homeowners argue about — whether a portable generator should ever be plugged straight into a wall outlet to power the whole house. That trick, called backfeeding, can send electricity back out onto the lines and electrocute a utility worker trying to restore your power, and it can fry your own wiring when the grid returns. The safe path everyone in the trade points to is a transfer switch installed by a licensed electrician, which isolates your house from the grid. It costs more than a cheap extension cord. It's also the difference between powering your fridge and starting a fire — or worse. On this one, the careful side isn't being overcautious. It's being correct.
So gather the few things that actually carry the weight here. The dark doesn't hurt people — the fight against the dark does, and almost every outage death traces back to a burning engine or stove in a space that couldn't breathe. The generator lives outdoors, twenty feet out, with a battery-backed CO detector on every floor as your silent witness. The people who depend on power need a plan made before the failure, not during it. And when the lights come back, they can come back swinging, so unplug what you care about. Strip it all down and one idea runs through every piece of it: in an outage, the most dangerous thing in your house is whatever you bring inside to make yourself comfortable.
Hold onto that, because it changes how you'll think about the next two questions any disaster forces on you — whether to stay in that house at all, or get out while you still can.