Winter prep starts now, not when the first freeze hits. Update your home, car, and family kits for cold weather: emergency lighting, warm layers, a stocked car kit, and a working generator with fuel on hand. Check chimneys, CO detectors, and space heaters before you need them, and make sure everyone in the family knows the basics — water shutoffs, fire extinguishers, and what to do if they’re caught out in the cold.
This article has been completely rewritten by Lisa Bedford, August, 2026.
Every year around this time, we set our clocks back an hour and pretend that’s the hard part. It’s not. The real shift is what’s coming next — shorter days, harder freezes, and sometimes, sudden changes in temperatures that can catch us by surprise.
I use the time change as my personal trigger. While everyone else is resetting clocks around the house (and the batteries are getting swapped out of every smoke detector), I’m doing a walk-through of our winter preps. Here’s what’s on that list.
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Preparing for Winter Weather
Keep your house from turning against you.
This is the best time to prepare your home for cold weather and hard freezes while you have power, temperatures are still fairly moderate, and you have time to assess and plan for cold weather emergencies.
Add emergency lighting to each room in your home. Shorter days mean more hours spent in a cold, dark house if the power goes out. I keep a Luci solar lantern in every room. It charges off ambient light, collapses flat for storage, and got real use during Hurricane Harvey when it was the only reliable light source in the house for days. I have a complete list of emergency lights I recommend here.
Test your generator and make sure you have enough fuel to last at least 2-3 weeks. If you want to add one to your preparedness gear, learn how to buy your first generator and assess whether or not you need one. If you have a home generator, it’s time to have the annual service done.
Have your chimney or flue cleaned and/or inspected. If you heat with wood, get your chimney or flue swept and inspected before you light the first fire of the season. Creosote buildup is a real fire risk, and it’s an easy thing to put off year after year.
Test every carbon monoxide detector in the house and confirm it has working battery backup, especially if you’re running a woodstove, gas heat, or a generator this winter.
Remember safe practices with space heaters. When you pull the space heaters out of storage, plug them directly into a wall outlet, never a power strip or extension cord, which can overheat and start a fire. Remember to keep them at least three feet from anything flammable. Heating equipment is the second-leading cause of home fires, right behind cooking.
Safeguard your outdoor spigots. A garden hose left connected over winter is one of the easiest ways to burst an outdoor spigot without a hard freeze even touching the inside of your house. Water trapped in the hose has nowhere to expand when it freezes, and that pressure backs up into the pipe itself, cracking it even if the spigot is otherwise fine.
Disconnect and drain every hose, then slip an insulated faucet cover, just a few dollars at any hardware store, over each spigot before the first hard freeze. If you’ve had freeze problems before, it’s also worth checking whether your spigots are the older standard type or already frost-proof (frost-proof ones tuck the shutoff valve back inside the wall, away from the cold) swapping to frost-proof is a solid upgrade to plan for next season.
Identify and address drafts in your home. Here’s a test to run on a cold or windy day — run your hand slowly around the edges of your exterior doors and windows. If you feel air moving, that’s your leak. No wind that day? Light a candle and hold it near the same spots. If the flame flickers or leans, you’ve found it.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix with door sweeps, about$10 at a hardware store. Weatherstripping tape handles most window gaps. Neither takes more than twenty minutes, and both make a bigger dent in your heating bill than people expect.
Insulate exposed pipes. During the 2021 Texas Freeze, the burst pipe was a major complication because on top of no power and icy days and nights, we were dealing with a flood on top of everything else. In just an 18-month stretch (2024 through mid-2025), State Farm alone processed over 20,000 frozen-pipe and winter water damage claims, paying out more than $628 million total, with the average payout topping $30,000 per claim.
Depending on the age and type of construction in your home, you may be surprised when you begin tracking down exposed pipes! Living in Texas, our home’s plumbing pipes were mostly in the attic, and that’s exactly where the pipe burst!
To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, wrap any exposed pipes (under sinks near exterior walls, in crawl spaces, in the garage) with foam pipe insulation before the first hard freeze. If you know where your main water shutoff valve is, that’s worth confirming now too, not at 2 a.m. when a pipe’s already split. Trust me on that one.
Winterize your garden before the first hard freeze. Bring in or cover cold-sensitive plants, mulch around perennials and fruit trees, disconnect and drain hoses, and get any remaining harvest in before a frost wipes it out. Don’t forget your tools need winterizing too.
Your Vehicle & Travel
Unpack every emergency kit and bug-out bag. Do this check every six months. Look for stale food, leaking containers, and clothing or shoes that no longer fit. Check batteries in things like flashlights and headlamps to ensure they’re still viable. If your kit contains any medications, those should be refreshed unless it’s something like first aid supplies. If you’ve found a new must-have since your last check, add it now.
Repack all emergency kits and bags for the winter. Include hand and foot warmers, gloves, wool caps, extra wool socks, long johns (my silk long johns have lasted at least two decades and still keep me warm), and a small emergency stove/heater.
Prep your car for breakdowns and being stranded in winter weather. Learn more about how to get your car ready for cold temps. This is one of those common emergencies that happen at the worst possible moment and one of the easiest to be fully prepared for.
Review the emergency kit/supplies you keep in your car. If you don’t have one, read this post for how to assemble a vehicle kit. For the winter, you may need to add an ice scraper and brush, a sturdy snow shovel, and a box of kitty litter. Throw a pair of waterproof boots in the trunk. Roll up a couple of wool blankets and store them under the back seats, and add a beach towel to absorb tracked in snow/water.
Get ready for cold temps in your car by adding an immersion heater to every vehicle emergency kit. This one item alone, powered by your car battery, allows you to melt snow to have a water source, heat up water to add to things like hot chocolate mix or soup mix, and have warm water for sanitation. Here are more details about assembling a Winter Survival Food Kit — handy if you’re ever stranded on a cold day.
Plan & Prep For a Safe Family Season
Talk to your kids about winter safety. Do they know what to do if they get lost in snow or caught in a sudden cold rain? Everything You Need to Know About Winter Survival for Kids covers it.
Don’t forget the pets. Store extra pet food and water with your other winter supplies, and have a plan to bring outdoor animals inside during a hard freeze. Here’s a full pet emergency kit checklist if you haven’t put one together yet.
Do a pre-cold-weather check on older friends and family members. Cold weather can be especially tough on our most vulnerable loved ones, so while you’re refreshing the batteries in your CO detectors and putting covers over the outdoor spigots, set aside some time to do the same type of preps for the older members in your circle of family and friends.
Prepare For a Cozy Season
Educate yourself about staying warm. There are dozens of ways to stay warm during a power outage. Choose two or three that fit your budget, expected winter weather, and your family needs.
Hit a few thrift stores or yard sales and buy extra blankets. They have so many uses during the winter, aside from the obvious. Here are all the different ways I put blankets to work, especially in the winter!
Plan on soups and casseroles for meals. In my house, homemade soup and maybe a quesadilla or grilled cheese sandwich practically screams, “Winter is finally here!” Collect recipes for both, but also learn how to make a hearty soup and casserole without using a recipe! A hot meal from scratch, made with healthy ingredients is just the best way to hunker down on a chilly night.
In a power outage, how would you cook a meal? Winter weather can bring power outages due to freezes and an over-burdened power grid. Have at least two different ways you could cook a meal if the power went out for more than a few hours.
Check your space heaters. Always plug them directly into a wall outlet, not a power strip. Space heaters can overload the power strip and cause fires. Also, place the heating unit away from hazards. FYI: Heating fires are the second most common cause of fires after cooking.
Want More Useful Info From Survival Mom?
Related Content
- The Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Winter Weather
- Don’t Leave Home Without It: The Vehicle 72-Hour Kit
- Everything You Need to Know About Winter Survival for Kids
Frequently Asked Questions
Right when the clocks change is a good trigger. It’s early enough that stores are still stocked and you’re not scrambling once the first cold front actually hits.
The car kit. Everyone thinks about the house, but a dead phone and no blanket in a stranded car during a freeze is its own emergency.
No. A generator helps, but layering, extra blankets, a safe alternate heat source, and a stocked pantry cover most winter power outages without one unless you live in a part of the country with extreme winter weather. In that case, a generator might be something that literally saves your life. Read this for my advice on which type of generator to buy.
The Final Word
Fall back, reset the clocks, and use the extra hour for something that will make sure your home and family are ready with the temperature drops.
What do you do to get prepped for winter weather?
Originally published December 1, 2019; updated August, 2026 by Lisa Bedford.
Good tips. I need to change out the food in my van’s storage bins too. No one wants to eat year-old applesauce and stale Ritz, lol. The peanut butter packets can stay though.
I really like this idea of changing the clock and checking supplies, kind of like checking the smoke detector batteries campaign they always do this time of year.
Also really wanted to stress the need for a good car pack especially if you live in a cold climate. My brother was stuck on the Thruway near Buffalo NY after a snow storm – he was there for 6 hours about 1/4 mile from the exit. He could have walked to my mom’s but didn’t want to abandon the car. He learned the importance of a car kit that day!
One of the most common emergencies is a home fire, and one of the deadliest.
Make checking your smoke detectors part of your “fall back” routine. Also be sure you have the proper fire extinguishers, placed appropriately around the house, and that you know how to use them.
You had links for almost everything except the immersion heater. what is ist and what is a good one?
I can’t believe I didn’t add a link for that! This is similar to the one I own, http://amzn.to/2yNMWns