How to winterize your home and yourself, a Yankee’s guide

Hi all. God, my heart wrenches thinking about what is happening to you folks right now. I've seen some advice posted on /r/texas but I haven't seen the same here, so I want to let you know that 30 degrees at night is extremely cold, but I want to offer you some tips on how to make it through the nights.

1) Do not break a sweat. Sweat is how we cool ourselves, and it can saturate our clothing causing heat loss over the long term. Layer up, but if you are being active you must pay attention to your body heat, and if you are about to sweat it is time to take off a layer or two. Your goal is to add and remove layers and/or zip and unzip layers in order to keep your body temperature just under sweating.

2) Layers = warmth. Humans have a natural body heat in the high 90s, and statying warm is a matter of holding that heat as close to the body as possible. Your thickest underwear will hold in a few layers of warm air in between the weaves of the fabric. Another pair over that doubles the latyers of air. If you have yoga pants, there's an even better layer. Jeans or sweatpants should go on to help cut the wind that can get through to the lower layers. Best yet a few layers of underwear, a pair of yoga pants, a pair of sweats, and then a pair of jeans to cut the wind.

3) If you have a tent, set it up wherever you have enough room. Move furniture if you need to and set it up. A tent will do a remarkably good job of holding in heat, think of it as an additional pocket of insulating air.

3a) Do not sleep directly on the floor of the tent. Put an air mattress, a foam pad, a fluffy blanket, drag a twin mattress or two into the tent, or lay out a layer or two of clothes in an absolute pinch. If you lay directly on the floor, you will lose heat to it, and even if you're on carpet you will compress the carpet and lose heat. There are not enough layers of that insulating air in a single layer of compressed fabric like carpet compressed by your body weight.

4) WINDOWS This is a huge place for warm air to escape your house. Obviously you have them closed, but if you do have some spare sheets, or better yet a tarp or trash bags duct tape them along the window frame. Hell, dude, even saran wrap or tin foil will do in a pinch.

5) Door frames. Roll up a bath towel or a beach towel and cram it in the bottom of the door frame. This will cut a huge amount of the draft. Duct tape the rest of the frame for extra insulation.

6) If you don't have the ability to set up a tent, then remember, every pocket of air between you and the outside is just a little bit more warmth for you. Move to the interior of the house. The basement if you have one. Focus one keeping one bedroom warm rather than the whole house.

7) From there, any layers of fabric you have will help. Seriously unpack your dresser and pile it on top of you if that's the best you have. Even if you don't have a tent to set up or a mattress to lay on, put several layers of clothes or cardboard, or anything you can between you and the ground, and put the cloth stuff on top of you.

I sincerely hope this information helps one of you. I wish I could help more.

Please don't burn anything for warmth indoors. If you are going to sleep in your car with the heat on for a couple hours at a time, please be sure you're in a well ventalated area.

TLDR: the more pockets of air you can make between you and the outside, the better. The closer to your body, the better.