[cgriswald]

You're absolutely right.

I live on the peninsula. We've had many more than 4-5 power outages the last couple of years. Usually they last 4-8 hours, but we've had several that lasted for days, including the most recent one which was 48-hours (and we had one a few weeks ago for 24-hours). They've re-routed power, not fixed the actual cause, so some of our neighborhood is still without power. The cause is a huge mess of trees, wires, and broken poles. We spoke to a PG&E worker and he said it will probably take about 36-hours to fix, it's not high priority (we still have traffic lights out in town), and they probably won't work on it over the weekend. So some of our neighbors are looking at a week-long outage.

It's been cold here, with temperatures down in the 30s some nights. The temperature in our house was less than 50 degrees this morning. We do have a wood burning fireplace, but we've never used it, so I'm hesitant to do so unless we really need it. Even then, it's not enough to heat the whole house.

We've finally decided to get some alternative power here. Probably solar+battery with natural gas generation as backup (before that's illegal). We can only sort-of afford it. I don't know what other people are going to do.

[D13Fd]

Many wood fireplaces barely heat anything. You have to open the flue to let the smoke escape, and the heated air from your house escapes as well. That air has to be replenished from somewhere—and that somewhere is "outside," where the air is freezing.

So in the end all you get is heat immediately around the fireplace, and a cold house everywhere else.

(None of this applies to modern fireplaces that account for these issues - but I don't think that's what you are talking about here.)

[BeLoSmc]

Lived in a house for a decade with only wood heat, as do lots of folks, this just isn’t accurate.