It is 40 degrees outside, two adjacent houses have no power, one is insulated, the other not, otherwise they are identical. Both have heat pumps, and both are suffering an outage. In the insulated house the temperature drops from 68 degrees to 59 degrees by morning, in the uninsulated house the temperature drops to 50 degrees. In the same house a few months later, with the winter nighttime temperature of 0 F, the insulated house sees a drop from 68 to 50 degrees and the uninsulated one sees a drop to 28 degrees.
Luckily these houses are experiment buildings and the students sleeping in these houses have cold weather gear. A further measurement of water pipe temperature in the early morning shows in the uninsulated basement that the pipes are at 33 degrees. Time to turn the power back on and warm the house up.
Power was off in both houses for 10 hours in both cases. The experiment shows that a 24-hour outage in a polar vortex is likely to burst pipes and cause other internal damage. Something we learned in real life with the damage done by the Polar Vortex in Texas.
The homes are on city water, so opening a tap to keep the water running through the pipes in the uninsulated house could likely prevent damage, but homes on a well don’t have that option.
So, what does this mean about outages and duration?
A little and a lot.
The little is that even uninsulated, if there is a basement, likely damage will be minimal for 6-12 hours from an outage to an all-electric home.
The lot is that the uninsulated home will likely see damage beyond just being cold in 24 hours, and that our current 7-day restoration of power in a catastrophic Storm likely will result in tens of thousands of dollars in damage to a home.
Installing insulation and better windows in the existing premises needs to be job-1, updating building codes needs to be job -2. Reimagining a high resiliency grid needs to be job- 3.
But like so many countries, there is little or no focus on Job-1 in the US.