Oxygen from portable units, which don't require electricity, tided Edith over.

"We kept expecting the power to come back on," said Lynn, who eventually called his brother. He picked them up in a four-wheel-drive and took them to his house. They would have acted faster had they known they were in for an extended outage.

Would they prepare differently in the future? "We wished we had candles and flashlights handier, and it would have helped if our extra blankets were more accessible," Lynn said. "Fortunately, we had a lot of candles that had been given to us for Christmas."

• What would Markum and Hohmann have done differently? They wouldn't have opened their refrigerator door until 24 hours or so had passed. "We thought we should try to use up as much stuff as possible," said Brett. "Then I talked to a friend who said the best thing to do was keep the fridge shut. " They eventually took their frozen food to a restaurant that's owned by a neighbor and put it in the walk-in freezer.

And they'll make sure their battery-operated Coleman lantern is functional. "It has a battery pack you charge from an outlet," Brett said. "It wasn't charged. We took it to a neighbor's but it wouldn't take the charge."

Instead, they used candles strategically placed throughout their house.

Alternative heat sources are on people's minds.

Pickrell said many people coming into his stores are asking for ventless inserts. They cost less than a vented insert, they're easy to install and they're 99.9 percent efficient.

A drawback is they create a lot of moisture. "You don't want to put them in a small room because of the moisture problem."

Jeff Cleveland, marketing manager for Empire Heating Systems, an Illinois company that includes ventless systems among its products, said they are intended to be a supplemental source of heat and they work best if there's a forced-air heating system that's moving air through the house. If you have a typical (furnace) that changes the air inside your house every six hours, running a vent-free heater is not an issue, he said.

The more airtight your home, however, the more likely moisture could be an issue.

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E-MAIL: kclayton@desnews.com