If you live in an area with below freezing winter temperatures, keeping the heat on in your house (if possible) is a big deal. You may do fine with cold weather clothing and sleeping bags, but your pipes will not do so well.

The most common heating set up in older houses in Anchorage is hot water baseboard fed by a gas boiler. Most of these setups require an electric pump to circulate the water. When the power goes off, the heat goes off also. In the part of Anchorage where I used to live (the "Hillside") loosing power was not uncommon, due to requent high winds and lots of trees blowing down. I had a portable generator.

My present home is down on the flats, where power outages still happen, but more rarely. For a variety of reasons, when I moved in here I didn't have a generator. A few years ago, we had a widespread major wind event, with ambient temps in the 0 to 10 F range. Power was off at my house for ~36 hours. I barely managed to keep my pipes from freezing by a combination of desperate measures. We moved our propane patio grill inside (I know, a serious safety issue!) and also used a smaller portable propane tent heater which we moved from room to room. Several of my neighbors were not so lucky, and had pipes break. They had many thousands of dollars of repairs to plumbing, floors and walls. Frozen pipes ain't no joke!

I now have a portable generator stashed away. I also had an electrician wire a switch and "pigtail" onto the furnace. This is a common modification up here, and allows you to throw the switch which isolates your furnace boiler from house power. The pigtail can then be plugged into the generator. If wired correctly, it is a safe set up for running your gas boiler. You only need to run it periodically, just enough to keep the house barely above freezing (not necessarily comfortably warm).