Covered that already: > Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enoug

Covered that already: > Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating. My furnace runs on 120V power pulling ~8A when running. That's ~1kW. Comparable sized resistive heating would use about 9kW. 1kW for a few hours a day is easy to provide through a cheap generator, a couple small solar panels and a single marine battery, or apparently a ~$220 wind turbine I can order on Amazon that can output up to 1200W. 9kW is a whole different ball game. And that's just heating. My stove uses in the order of single-digit watts for seconds at a time. It can also just be lit with a match without power. My water heater does run a small exhaust fan while it's heating, but again... we're talking hundreds of watts instead of kilowatts. Yes, all these options pretty much still need power, but the smaller power requirements are a hell of a lot easier to provide than the power needed for resistive electric heating. I could run my water heater off of a desktop UPS.