Heating Your Home Safely Through the Georgian Winter

Every Georgian winter brings the same quiet danger: the way we heat our homes. Heating is the season's leading cause of house fires — and of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Both are almost entirely preventable.

The two winter killers

• Fire — heaters placed too close to curtains, furniture or bedding; chimney and flue fires; overloaded sockets and faulty wiring.
• Carbon monoxide (CO) — an invisible, odourless gas from any fuel burned without enough air: gas heaters, wood stoves, gas water heaters, and generators.

What Georgia's winters show

• In Gudauri (2024), twelve people died from carbon-monoxide poisoning after a generator was run indoors during a power cut.
• House fires take lives every winter — a fire in Tbilisi's Gldani district claimed the life of a three-year-old child.
• The World Bank has documented widespread "underheating" in Georgia: when heating is unaffordable, families turn to risky, improvised warmth — exactly the conditions behind these tragedies.

Your safe-heating checklist

1. 1.Keep at least one metre between any heater and curtains, furniture, or bedding. Never dry clothes on a heater.
2. 2.Never leave a heater running while you sleep or leave the house.
3. 3.Vent gas and wood heaters to the outside, and have chimneys and flues cleaned before winter.
4. 4.Never run a generator indoors, in a garage, or near windows.
5. 5.Fit smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors — and test them.
6. 6.Don't overload sockets with heaters; check for damaged cords and plugs.
7. 7.Keep a way to stop a small fire within reach — an extinguisher or a fire-extinguisher ball near the stove or heater.

Know the CO warning signs — headache, dizziness, nausea, drowsiness. If you feel them, get everyone into fresh air and call 112.

A warm home should be a safe home. Detect early, ventilate, and keep protection where the heat is — that is what ORDEX is built for.

Sources: Gudauri carbon-monoxide deaths (2024) — Wikipedia, NBC News, Al Jazeera; Tbilisi (Gldani) house fire — Pravda Georgia; "State of Underheating in Georgia" — World Bank.