Survival Heat Loss
More Articles Related to Heat
Above is an excellent instructional survival video about the 5 heat loss mechanisms as they apply to your body and shelter. This is certainly timely information with the approaching winter season here in the Northern Hemisphere of the world. Winter survival requires a fine understanding of how heat it lost, but it is also important for survivors any time of the year in any locality.
Survival Topics previously covered this same material in the article How Body Heat is Lost, but the outdoor survival video adds the visual element as an aid in understanding the process of heat loss in a survival situation.
Staying Warm to Survive
Before getting into the five basic ways heat is lost to the outside environment, it is instructive to note why the prevention of heat loss is so important to wilderness survival.
Heat is produced through the burning of fuel, be it calories in your body from the food you eat or the wood used to heat your shelter. Because you need ample heat in order to survive, heat can be described as the currency of survival.
Back at home you usually do not think much about heat and heat loss. You normally have easy access to plenty of wholesome food, a warm heated shelter, and enough dry clothing. However in a wilderness survival situation it is not like that at all. Your survival resources will be limited and therefore in order to survive you must conserve as best you can what you have. If your shelter is cold, your clothing wet, and your food reserves low or non existent, your very life will be at risk due to the loss of more heat than you are producing.
When surviving in the wilderness if you are loosing heat faster than you can acquire replacement calories in the form of food or fuel then you are in a loosing situation that will eventually lead to disaster.
But you can have too much of a good thing. Acquire an excess of heat and your body will perspire and eventually soak your clothing with sweat. In a survival situation becoming wet is very dangerous because a wet body looses heat up to 25-times faster than when dry. The excess heat you thus produced will lead to a vastly increased rate of heat loss, threatening you survival.
To sum it up, the regulation of heat is very important to the wilderness survivor. You must conserve and add to your body heat reserves through the proper use of clothing, shelter, fuel, and food, but you must also regulate your body heat so that you do not become so hot that your clothing becomes soaked with sweat.
To this end the survival expert needs to know how body heat is lost and use this information throughout the day to regulate his body temperature to an optimum level. For example, the use of the 3-layer clothing system is a proven way to efficiently regulate your body temperature. Eat plenty of nutritious high calorie food, stay dry, build a shelter, and know how to make a fire.
About This Outdoor Survival Skills Video
The Ron Hood survival video covers the 5 ways of loosing heat, namely:
- Conduction
- Convection
- Radiation
- Respiration
- Evaporation
Understanding these 5 heat loss mechanisms is very important when choosing your clothing for survival, making a survival shelter, or when on the move.
Ron Hood is a well known survival expert at the excellent survival website survival.com. When I stumbled upon his mechanisms of heat loss survival video I wanted to share it with Survival Topics readers in the hopes they can learn from it and perhaps even be introduced to Ron Hood and his good work. The full set of high quality survival videos are available for purchase on Ron's site. You can view the survival.com website here.
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