Our house has four-zone gas hot water baseboard heating. If things get cold enough (and they were), we can get frozen pipes, a messy and expensive problem. Also, some of the lowest zones appear to be hard to drain: the spout is two feet above the lowest run of pipe.
It has occurred to me during other, much shorter power failures that we really ought to be able to have heat in the house, given just a little bit of power. We still have the gas supply. The four circulator motors don't have to lift the water, just move it around. In fact, they are 1/15 HP, using about 75W. The furnace is electric start, so it needs a little as well.
I went to Walmart and bought a 750W inverter. This I clipped to the battery terminals of our idling Miata. I disconnected the furnace power from the mains and connected a 3-conductor wire with plug to it. It was definitely not up to code, but it was reasonably safe. I plugged in the furnace via extension cords, and the furnace fired right up. Our house was warm and dark, still lit by candles, for the duration.
The Miata idled for about 36 hours, using most of a tank of gas. The guys on Car Talk say that idling cars are Ok: police cars do it all the time. There were no noticeable effects on the Miata.
We ran a few other things on the power as well: the DSL modem and a laptop for a little while, a battery charger, and our outdoor LED Christmas lights, which pull virtually no power.
I tried charging the UPS for our regular computers, but it complained loudly about wiring faults in its supply. I suspect that the invert either doesn't have ground hooked up usefully, or the UPS had some complaint about the modified sine wave that the inverter generates.
This all worked well, but it was a long haul. This was the first major outage we've had since moving into the house in 1991, so it probably isn't worth thinking about getting a generator.