We usually have a power cut for multiple days each year as well as a number of short ones. The wood and gas stoves are good in those circumstances but only if you're there. We have a generator but of the manual variety. Colleagues, especially those who take holidays or long weekends away, typically have automatic ones. Those a several thousand dollars.

Relatedly, a colleague is in Hawaii for three weeks, a trip he very nearly cancelled because the spring thaw came early this year and he was nervous about not being home to monitor the sump pump. In the end he paid a pet walking service to come, not to walk the pet, but just to peer into the pit each day. I would not buy another house with a sump pump; they're there because they're needed.

I've found the trick is to keep an old tarp in the car boot. When you learn to keep your eyes open there are often bits of wood, tree branches, old wooden furniture, pine cones (great firelighters) etc on the side of roads when leaving the city for the weekend or around areas of new development when offcuts get chucked into skips. When woodburner was our only heat source and burning all day and half the night, we'd go through about 10 sq metres per year, so did need to get a few trailers full over the summer before the price ramps up in autumn. But for just occasional use, you can forrage a surprising amount for free without any illicit activity. Plus you don't need a splitter for cutting up branches. An axe will do nicely for anything you can fit in your car boot.

So let me get this straight. You can only have a bathroom in a basement without a sump pump is the mains sewerage is below the level of your basement, probably on a flat site? Is this very modern houses only then?

This is our contingency pile. It's about a third of the wood we stacked for this past winter. That's a lot of car boot loads and it's a lot of axe swinging.

Kindling, yes, we pick up deadfall from around the property and use that.

I recommend a Bahco bow saw - with go through anything out to at least 75mm like a hot knife through butter, a 21" triangular bow saw takes up little room in the boot. I have several and often use my 36" in preference to a chain saw for logs or felling up to 125mm.

I'm the opposite. I find gas heaters ugly as hell, whereas woodburners give me that cosy and snug feeling. Plus I don't have to worry quite so much about carbon monoxide poisoning if the flue gets blocked as it's bloody obvious with a wood fire.

The sump pump isn't typically for sewerage, it's because basements are at or below the water table. It just pumps out ground water. New houses have them because housing projects are just thrown up anywhere, on former farmland, and don't have natural drainage. Mr. Hawaii has a new McMansion that will flood if the pump stops.

Our sump pump also pumps the water from the washing machine and the laundry tub but that's not usual and may not be legal in all jurisdictions.

Yes, a bathroom in a basement could only vent to the sewer or septic if the outlet was below the level of the basement. Some are, some have sewage pumps. I haven't seen a house where there was no need for a pump as built but we did renovate one by tearing up the basement floor and installing a new pipe under the septic tank to the newly built mains sewer. The levels all worked there.

I recommend getting some local Mennonite (Amish in some locations) kids to do it.

How many do you recommend carrying in your boot for contingencies?

Is that lot really for heating by wood burning only in the event of periodic power cuts?

Well they can both be ugly but with a nice hearth and surround you can take the attention away from the gas fire so all you're aware of is a glow. There's not much you can do similarly with a wood stove and that big pipe that sticks up and goes into the wall.

Unless your wood stove is actually right in what would be a normal fireplace.

I suppose it helps if you have panels where you can at least see flames.

Don't worry about it, just get one of the cheap detectors.

Oh no. That's a little over a cord, three cords will do us for two winters of having a fire every night. It's the contingency pile in the sense that we'd only use it if the nearer pile was exhausted.

I recommend having a box of firelogs. Doubtless it works out more expensive but if it's just as a back up $3 a log isn't much if it's just to provide some heat in the event of occasional power outage.

We actually used to use them in our first couple of winters. One log gave heat for the whole evening.

This was in a big, open room with stairs and front door with no hall or porch.

Then we moved the 'living room' into the second room...smaller but not cramped and not so open. No need for the stove no and, the best part, no getting rid of ashes.

Nice to get some sense of how much wood is in a cord. In my mind a cord of wood sounds small enough to be able to carry in my arms.

4ft x 4ft x 8ft (1.2m x 1.2m x 2.4m) split and stacked.

Just a bit too much for my bike then.