Hi. Actualexperience here... it depends on the ambient temperature and how much stuff is in said freezer. So heres a data point:
Freezer: normal upper level refrigerator freezer chock full of frozen fish caught on holiday in Alaska.
Place, Time: Houston, TX, Late Summer, Hurricane Igor just hit and knocked our power out for 14 days.
Findings: We kept the freezer shut and at about 4-5 days the fish was noticeably thawing and getting flexible. Still cold, but not frozen. I think we might have made an attempt at dry ice but it was too late in the process to matter.
At day 8 or so it had completely defrosted.
At day 10 the smell was so horrendous that if we opened the freezer door we would gag.
At day 14 the power returned. On day 15 or 16 we opened the now cold rotted fish in the freezer and cleaned it out. We vomited multiple times. The smell, despite multiple rounds of bleach, never really went away. The stench permanently inextricable from the lining of the freezer, and the flavor of every ice cube ever made in it from then on.
PSA: I've worked disaster relief/reconstruction in Houston, New Orleans, and a few other places. If you come across a fridge with the doors taped shut DO NOT OPEN IT. If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT.
It's not worth it. You will never make the fridge use-able again.
If you have to leave ahead of a disaster, consider emptying your fridges/freezer and propping the doors open.
> If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT. It's not worth it. You will never make the fridge use-able again.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here - that after 24 hours, things will be defrosted and rotted enough that the fridge/freezer will stink forever? That it should be taped closed and the whole thing disposed of after the event? Or are you saying only if you open it, it'll never be useable again? I have experienced a number of multi-day power outages, and have never had to tape a fridge shut and not use it again, so I disagree pretty strongly with that advice.
Absolutely agree with preemptively emptying fridges/freezers and leaving doors propped open.
> "I have experienced a number of multi-day power outages, and have never had to tape a fridge shut and not use it again, so I disagree pretty strongly with that advice."
How hot was it when this happened? Were you there to manage the situation or did you have to leave?
If you have to leave in a hurry and are not able to empty your fridge, and it is hot, and you are not able to return for a few days, then yes, your fridge will probably never be usable again.
If your fridge is in a cool basement, then yea, you probably just have some food spoilage.
> If you have to leave in a hurry and are not able to empty your fridge, and it is hot, and you are not able to return for a few days, then yes, your fridge will probably never be usable again.
That's much more useful, nuanced advice than "if it's been more than 24 hours, tape it shut and throw it away".
My experiences have been in more moderate climate, probably temps in the 15-25 range. That said, it also depends what's in the fridge - I moved into an apartment where some beer had exploded in a left-behind beer fridge, the entire inside was coated in green mold for several months. Treatment with succession of soap, bleach, and oxiclean, and it's still in use to this day - so contents of the fridge matters too.
> If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT.
I think your timing is off here. I lost power for about three days during Hurricane Charley. This was the middle of summer in Orlando, Florida so hot hot hot. As far as I remember, my roommate and I left the fridge closed and evacuated. When we returned, the contents of the fridge were spoiled, but I don't remember anything particularly horrendous about it.
If you refreeze rotten food, doesn't that reduce the smell released, like less odor is wafting around in the air from frozen meat than warmed up meat?
Like we are able to find preserved remains in ice of people who perished in these harsh climates, as opposed to a warmer climate where all the tissue would be putrid immediately.
Having gotten paid for fixing many a fridge and reclaiming a ton in college, the answer was, toss on a respirator, then pour a bottle of bleach in to the fridge (dorm size) and let it sit for a week in the heat. Then open it and hose it out. It was fine. Full size fridge is like 3 bottles of bleach. Also you have to put it on it's back (coils).
Soooo many students were like "This fridge is a loss" and would just give them to me.
(In Hurricane Ike, we lost power for seven days, and ice and dry ice at the local grocery stores were rationed. We have a gas range and a gas grill in the backyard hooked to the natural-gas line. Every night for the first few nights, quite a few neighbors came over to grill and share stuff from their freezers; we cooked side dishes on the gas range in the kitchen. Everyone sat around and ate and talked on the patio by candlelight. It actually was kind of a nice time, especially since the weather was unseasonably pleasant for that time of year.)
That does sound nice. Unfortunate that COVID is really going to make it harder for people to pool resources like that to handle an emergency situation.
I’m laughing a bit thinking of the absurdity going on in my brain. While reading the parent comment there were two parallel streams going on in my brain:
“That is so awesome that the community rallied together like that”
“What the duck are they doing having a large gathering in their yard?! Surely they could have figured out a safer way to do that! If someone got COVID during a hurricane with no power that could be really bad!”
> If someone got COVID during a hurricane with no power that could be really bad!”
The 2020 hurricane season will be starting soon. With COVID, the emergency financial legislation running out, the election, schools, holidays, and hurricane season, I fear this fall will be something we'll remember for decades to come.
Agreed, just makes it harder, and removes some of that feel good connection that comes from rallying in the face of catastrophe. Which imo is one of the best parts of being human.
Well if anything (trying to look on the bright side here), travel beyond your own community would be limited so less risk of spreading or bringing the disease over.
I think shock, depression, anger, disbelief, the mechanics of where to put the rotting fish... like there was a tree down in our front yard, every store was closed in a 40 mile radius, power was out to most of Houston... but yea hindsight being 20/20 i would have relocated the fish to a house with a generator. it was a really dark time man.
I'm familiar with the first 4 factors and how they can make the obvious difficult to do. Well at least you made it through, even if you lost the refrigerator.
I had a similar loss of fridge when we went on vacation one time and the power went off some time while we were gone and I had not emptied the freezer all the way as it seemed idiotic to garbage all that perfectly good food when we were only gone for 2 weeks.
If you had a shovel would it not have been the more hygienic disposal option, at about day 7/8 once you were sure the power was not coming back soon, to dig a 3.5 foot deep hole, put the fish in it and cover it over?
I think he described why he didn't get rid of the fish, some times the world is structured in such a way that you really can't handle the obvious things.
Also, whole burying fish may be logically obvious in this case, it is almost never the correct move in any other situation. Actions that defy common sense can be really difficult to commit, particularly in times when the stakes seem high. What if they buried it, the world was ending, and they somehow needed all that food? It's an easier call to make here than it was there.
There's really not much you can do. If you take it out and throw it away, the stench will just waft back into the house because the windows are open because there's no A/C. You'll also get curious critters at night and if they knock it over and drag it across the yard, well, now you have bigger problems.
Trash doesn't run because trees and lines are down, btw.
If you have even the smallest patch of ground, dig a small hole, drop the dead animals/spoiled meat in there, and the smell is gone within minutes.
My experience comes from living countryside with two cats dragging in rabbits, rats, pheasants and two/three daily mice and birds in. My cats prefer cat-food, so they drag in the dead animals, tuck it under the couch or behind the fridge, and then eat their favorite chunks, the assholes.
Throwing it on the compost heap smells way worse and attracts flies. than digging a ~3cm deep hole and covering it. A mouse under the ground, is gone in less than a week (I guess its eaten by worms and insects mostly).
My garden is doing very well.
You want to be very careful about pickling food of unknown freshness - if the meat had turned pickling will do nothing except provide a wonderful breeding ground for a lot of really fun bacteria.
There is a good trick to use if you leave on vacation (or for monitoring breast milk for those new parents). You can freeze a cup of water, and throw a coin on top. If your freezer melts at any point, the coin will be at the bottom, not the top of the water glass when it refreezes.
Ice floats. Even if the most of the ice in the cup has melted, but there was a little bit of it left, the coin will stay on top.
From my personal experience: while we were away on vacation, there was a power outrage for 24_ hours. Coin was on top, but all ice cream and frozen packaged food was ruined. Not sure about big chunks of beef.
a variant is to put an ice cube out of its container and tilted on the rack inside the fridge. If it thaws, it will fail through the rack and not be where you left it when you check for it.
Oh god, I remember this as well. We had a small chest freezer in the basement. It had this one "feature" that if the power went out it would not startup again until you flicked the power switch. For extended power outages lasting days this makes some sense but for a limited outage of a few hours this was bat shit crazy. Similar experience from the article, rotting meat, had to carry the freezer up the garage to clean it. Water + soap, bleach, lemon juice and many other combinations. Nothing would get rid of the smell even cleaning the rubber gaskets and seals. I even tried spraying the entire inner surfaces with Fabreeze odor killer and leaving it closed for a few days.
You missed the perhaps most important datapoint: how often and many times did you open the freezer? Side loaded freezer and fridges are extremely inefficient because all the cold air is let out when you open the door.
This is also why it's important to FILL the freezer as much as possible if you know you might lose power.
We lost power for 4 days, but I packed in every water bottle I could find before hand, and everything remained frozen for the entire period. Literally almost no space left for air.
Careful with that, it can be a massive headache when you want to try and get them back out again if you make the mistake of letting them freeze around something to where it's now stuck in place.
Yea so a few things he pointed out in this write up were readily observable. For example, the air falling out of the freezer is actually quite visible when hitting a hot humid ambient air. Also you could see the rate of defrosting accelerate everytime you opened the door.
By the time we were able to find a gas station with dry ice we were out looking for open wal marts at a 73 mile radius from the house (Columbus Texas). The dry ice was not significant enough to do much more than get the fish cool. It was too late.
Interesting point I'd never considered until this thread...
Why not tip the freezer / fridge onto its back? So that doors open "up"?
Aware they're typically not perfectly flat on the rear face, but close enough you could support it with minimal work. And if it's unpowered, there's no need for clearance back there.
On the one hand that would assist with the immediate problem but might cause another problem down the line.
Most small refrigerated appliances use hermetically sealed compressors and you’re actually supposed to wait a bit 24hrs ish before starting them to allow the oil in the system to drain back to where it belongs. So theoretically after the power came back on and you flip it back upright you should wait to turn it back on. In reality, lots of people move freezers and fridges and window a/c units and plug them back in and use them right away with no problem. But it is possible that you might severely shorten the life of your equipment too.
But the heat capacity of the air inside is negligible compared to that of the solid stuff inside. So it shouldn’t matter if you do it just a few times in two weeks.
I always imagined that the air and its thermal mass was insignificant compared to the ice cubes and frozen steaks and frozen pizzas. The mass of the air must be less than 1% of all those things, no?
Ice cubes always taste funny if used without good ice forms, absorbing the fridge odors. Use the ones with silicone cover. Not a hint of the freezer in the made ice.
I got these mostly because space is a luxury in our freezer (very tiny) and wanted to vertically stack them. I love them. It's such a weird thing to throw praise on, but I've literally told friends to get the silicon cover ice trays and never look back.
If their stove and oven are electric, and they don't have, or don't have fuel for, a propane or charcoal grill, then a hurricane could really knock out their ability to cook things.
Freshly downed live trees aren't great for firewood. The moisture content tends to make the wood difficult to light (if you can't spare lighter fluid, diesel, gasoline, candles, etc.) and it tends to produce a lot of smoke once lit. I've done enough camping that I can get wet wood burning if I have enough dry twigs, dry pine needles, birch bark, etc., but if your only experience with starting fires is pouring lighter fluid on split wood that has been dried 2+ years, you're going to have a bad time trying to get wet wood burning using only things you find in a forest after a storm.
And anything used in construction has been heavily treated to resist water damage, so I wouldn't want to be near those fumes, let alone eat something cooked from them.
It may be OK after the smoke clears. Rookies who have never used a real charcoal BBQ don't know when the coals are ready and start cooking too soon. You cook when it seems like it's too late the coals are ash but that's the time to do it.
He's talking about treated wood which is the exception. I wouldn't cook off of burning plywood or OSB but the smoke shouldn't be that toxic. Often the bottom plate of a wall will be pressure treated wood which is filled with all sorts of nasty preservatives and stuff from before 2004 was almost all treated with chromated copper arsenate. That's got a hexavalent Chromium compound (carcinogenic) along with Arsenic pentoxide (highly toxic) plus a dash of Copper because apparently the Arsenic and hexavalent Chromium weren't bad enough.
I would not cook on burning pressure treated lumber, but the vast majority of lumber in construction is not pressure treated.
Well, you're not driving off the "black bits". There's still plenty of "black bits" (unburned carbon and high-carbon compounds) in the interior. It's just that 1. you really really want to wait until the lighter fluid is burned off and 2. the whole surface hasn't started burning until the whole surface has started generating white ash. In the case of charcoal with igniter integrated in the outer layer ("match light" charcoal), I would guess you want to burn off that outer igniter layer.
As a young boy scout of 12 or so, I ate some pork that my patrol and I had cooked over charcoal before all of the lighter fluid had burned off. It tasted like lighter fluid smells. We never made that mistake again.
Pro tip from 12 year-old me: styrofoam cooler lids make great fans to speed the progression of the reaction.
Pro tip 2 from 12 year-old me: don't get the lid too close to the charcoal, or it will melt. Also, wet wool finger mittens can cook and become brittle far from a wet wood fire, because the fire gets very hot when you blow on it to keep it from going out and very cool when you go to check the temperature near your mittens.
Best advice is during hurricane season keep freezer and refrigerator stock to a minimum to keep your losses low. Stock up on non-perishables, but not overstock.
If you absolutely must have cold stuff while the power is out, either get a generator or look into 12V gear.
This is why you will see freezers lining the street for trash collection after a major power outage during a hurricane. Freezers are not super-expensive, and you can usually get them covered by insurance or disaster relief, so it's easier to just duct tape the entire fish coffin and be done with it.
I'm not talking about pandemic related issues. I'm talking about power disrupting disaster issues.
There's two reasons why most people on the Gulf Coast and lower Eastern seaboard keep their freezers completely stocked: so they have food to eat in the case of an emergency, and because a full freezer stays frozen longer.
The overly cautious approach is how anyone that does not want a lawsuit handles these sorts of things. Do I really need to chuck out that bottle of ibuprofen after 4 to 5 years?
It actually does, but not as clearly as I'd hoped.
"for a freezer of this size, completely packed, you would probably have twice as long before running into problems with melting when the power goes out, so about 36 hours. This assuming it's in a room at 19° C (a cool basement). If it were in a hot garage at 30° C, the food would thaw in about 3/4 of the time.
And while the power is out, for each time the door is opened for five seconds, subtract 7 minutes. "
I watched and enjoyed the original video when it came out, so I knew to look for this information in the text, making it easier to find.
He walks back the 36 hours claim which he recognizes is a completely unjustified extrapolation. And the 'subtract 7 minutes' is a very dubious answer to a completely different question.
Based on my experience last week, I think the 36 hours conservative ballpark. My upright freezer (pretty full) was still OK at 48 hours but I don't think it would have completely made it through another 24. A smaller top freezer compartment had enough thawing that I had to throw some things, but not everything, out.
The location of the freezer or refrigerator is critical. If you live in a house that has a typical unfinished basement, don't overlook the advantage it offers. With one simple change, you can noticeably lower your electric bill, reduce your carbon footprint, gain extra kitchen space and improve your health. Just move your refrigerator to the basement.
Since the basement is normally cooler than the upstairs, the refrigerator will run less often. This will not only extend its lifetime, but also lower the electricity it consumes, thus also reducing your carbon footprint. The kitchen space previously wasted by the refrigerator has uses that are only limited by your imagination.
Finally, you and your family will directly benefit from the exercise you get with trips to the fridge. Of course it is not convenient - that is the point. Sometimes you might even pass up that extra dish of ice cream, because it's a pain in the butt. However, the size of your butt may be improved.
It's a simple step that can be done in a couple of hours. And the recurring benefits are automatic and last a lifetime.
This seems like a decent idea if the thing that's in your fridge is ice cream, but not if it's ingredients for cooking meals. Whoever does the cooking is going to spend a ton of time running up and down while stuff overcooks, and then they'll be even more tired and get more complaints from the rest of the family. So you should be absolutely sure that you have an equitable family dynamic and that everyone agrees that you do, before you try this.
Yeah, I can certainly appreciate the environmental and cost savings, but this would make me miserable. I could get myself the make the trip for ice cream, but the multiple runs back to the fridge while preparing food has me agitated just thinking about it.
"Refrigerate X while cooking Y, then remove X from fridge as Y begins to [something]," and variants of that phrase are common scenarios in recipes. Your point is only valid for a portion of recipes, not all.
Let's also take into account how many ingredients you may need from the fridge when you plan ahead. Certain meals may require multiple trips to/from the basement (however far away that may be) depending on how many - and the size of - ingredients involved.
Very few recipes involve taking stuff from the freezer repeatedly however, most things will need to thaw in advance. Making ice cream in a freezer in the basement would suck, however.
Not having the fridge readily available in the kitchen would suck, though, so that only works if you have a dedicated freezer.
exactly because of kids i am more frequently distracted, and for example just today i forgot one (optional) ingredient because i didn't collect all the ingredients at the start.
There have already been two replies pointing out why this is a bad idea, but, why is this a good idea? Why is learning to plan your meals better (for... some definition of that term, which doesn't appear to be the usual one) worthwhile?
I cook often and, to OP's point, cooking can go a lot smoother if I spend a few extra minutes up front gathering all of my ingredients and prepping my workstation/workflow. That said, I also recognize that there are practical reasons for not always including every single item during said prep and making a few trips to the fridge during the cook.
Perhaps a smaller L1 cache in the form of a mini-fridge could hold the prep for a given meal or even day or so in the kitchen, while keeping the cold storage cold storage downstairs.
My mother in law has a small freezer in the kitchen, and a bigger freezer in the basement.
That way she can load the cooking ingredients into the smaller kitchen freezer before cooking, can keep most of the stock in the basement.
Best of both world, assuming you're sufficiently organized to actually remember to move the stuff to the kitchen in advance, and not forget half of it :-)
I’m not sure how practical it is, however. The first problem that popped into my mind was that the stove would often be unattended while I ran downstairs to grab something I forgot from the fridge.
> I’m not sure how practical it is, however. The first problem that popped into my mind was that the stove would often be unattended while I ran downstairs to grab something I forgot from the fridge.
I often leave the stove unattended whilst I check the grill outside. So long as it's less than a few minutes (and you have a fire extinguisher on hand in the kitchen—as one always should), there shouldn't be a problem in most circumstances.
If you leave a pan with oil on the induction stove and then "quickly check the mail in the other room while it heats up" you might come back to an unpleasant surprise of burning oil...
in the US natural gas stoves are very common. There is some risk when frying on high heat that you could start an oil fire... Never used induction but gas offers very fine control of heat with a nice stove, especially compared to electric which relies on radiant heat from a coil and cannot change temperatures rapidly
I had induction for nearly a decade and am now back on gas. I miss the ease of cleaning that induction offers, and the efficiency for things like boiling water. [1]
But if you use woks or other vessels that do not entirely touch the stovetop surface, gas is better. I made fried rice the other day on my gas stove, and it was a completely different experience than induction. The sides of the wok just heat up so much more than with induction.
Of course, it's a huge pain to clean all the tiny grains of rice that drop onto the stovetop. I wish kitchens had dual stovetops, with maybe 2 gas burners and the rest induction. But I've never seen a home like that; even high-end homes have either a nice gas range or an induction ranges.
fun fact: Menlo Park recently outlawed gas for new constructions. I imagine most folks will go to induction, which has previously been relatively rare here.
Bosch for example has a modular system where you can mix and match technologies. They have a 6 kW gas burner available in it [1] which can be matched up with a nice induction top [2].
I've had direct on coil and behind glass induction, and vastly prefer gas. I get way more heat, like far too much at max, on the gas stove, which is a good thing because I can actually control the level of heat output, rather than just the length of the oscillations between on/off on the induction stove. I have a few steel pans and a few cast irons, and for all of them the gas stove heats more evenly, offers finer control of the heat level, and can reach a much higher heat faster than any of the three induction stoves I've had the pleasure of renting over the years, some brand new. Gas ovens are better too, all the electric ovens I've had ran cold relative to the indicated temp, which meant changing cooking times and temps, and had a pretty embarrassing broil setting compared to what you have on gas (a proper inferno)
Sure, you have to take off the grates to clean, but after you spend those 10 seconds to remove the grates its no harder wiping crusted food off of a flat steel surface than a flat glass one.
Inductions are electric and does not have the issues you mention. But I see. For some reason natural gas didn't pop up in my head. Where I live nobody use those.
As an additional benefit, since any fridge or freezer generates waste heat on its 'warm' side (the room itself), the additional heat from the freezer will rise from the basement into the rest of the house. As compared to if you had a freezer on the 3rd floor of a tall/narrow town house, all that the heat would do is rise towards the ceiling and attic.
I would not advocate for moving a fridge to the basement just because of the hassle and back and forth trips involved. But if I had a dedicated top-opening chest freezer, sure.
That's true, but having a fridge in your house is going to generate waste heat no matter what climate you live in. Just a question of what you do with it.
A guy on the phone that sells used freezers told me that compressor has some liquid that gets thicker when temperature drops below X and compressor has to work harder.
The other reason i'v read somewhere is related to compressor not maintaining stable temperature, won't turn on when needed etc.
These may be false statements and I ask for some guidance from professionals - is that the case? I understand when temp may fall below 0, you need some special freezer. Liebherr guy assured me any of their freezers will work OK as long as it is > 0C. But he couldn't tell about other manufacturer freezers.
As i'm in the process of buying a freezer that has to work in basement, could someone chime in please? Is Liebherr my only option?
Uhh, if your basement frequently gets below 0 °C, you have far bigger problems than the freezer. This should normally not happen unless you're living somewhere in the Arctic.
"Freezing" and "freezer cold" aren't the same temperature - I'd generally consider "freezing" to be about 0°C, where a freezer should be at most -18°C in order to stop food from spoiling.
Also, get a chest freezer. They are much more efficient.
Every time you open a standing freezer, the cold air "false out", since cold air is more dense than warm air. The chest freezer on the other hand will hold the cold air in place.
They are more efficient in keeping the food frozen. But they are less efficient in getting the food out of it. This is how you find 5 year old products at in the bottom of the freezer when you finally clean it up.
Unfortunately, the link doesn't work - and I was looking forward to seeing how you organize a horizontal freezer vertically because I have the 'black hole' problem...
Sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice though, nowadays very few people have a house with a basement like that anymore, unfortunately. I don't get it myself to be honest, it's more efficient use of the ground surface area a house occupies.
I'd go with a chest freezer in the basement and a small fridge in the kitchen for frequently used / quick access stuff (milk, tonight's dinner ingredients).
I meant the opposite. I do indeed have a (very) unfinished basement that gets a bit wet with a freezer. Many people won't want a freezer in their downstairs living room. At least that's how I took the comment.
My basement is 80% finished, but the freezer lives in the unfinished part. But "unfinished" is relative, I still have concrete floors and walls with insulation on the walls, just no sheetrock and bare rafters on the ceiling.
Yeah, you don't really want to run down to the basement every time you want some ice cubes or cream for your coffee.
But that's more or less what I do. I have a (not small) fridge in the kitchen and an upright freezer in the basement. (I find chest freezers can become something of a black hole.)
When I had a 48-hour power outage recently, the freezer upstairs was pretty much defrosted--which was mostly fine because I didn't have perishable meat/fish up there. But the freezer downstairs was fine. (Made a point of keeping it buttoned up the whole time.)
I’d hazard a guess that most of the losses are from when you open the door and the seal around the door. Also while cooler than ambient my fridge and freezer don’t feel cool to the touch so I think that the walls are thick enough.
Otherwise fridges and freezers would ship with thicker insulation.
What about the calories used to travel up and down the stairs by multiple family members?
Say over a month you burn enough calories to eat an extra steak to make up the energy lost, would the environment be better or worse off?
What about time lost? Say you wasted an extra hour or two every fortnight just getting to and from the fridge, what if instead you had read a book or worked on your hobbies? Would you be happier? Would your family be happier having an extra hour of time every fortnight?
What? It's you who suggested avoiding extra movement may be ecologically beneficial due to less food consumed. I have no idea why you're pulling virtue signaling into this.
A simple way to detect power failure induced thawing in a freezer is to store a paper cup about half full of frozen water in the freezer. By keeping a coin on top of the ice it’s easy to see with a quick glance if the temperature has risen for an extended period of time (possibly due to a temporary power failure or the door not being fully closed).
Another idea I’ve used while on vacation. Get a plastic bottle, fill it maybe 1/4 to 1/2 with water, freeze it, then before leaving turn it upside down. If the ice stays at the bottom of the bottle when you get back you should be all good.
It is possible for the Ice to partially melt and the coin to not sink, the ice would need to COMPLETELY melt before this test would work, given the nature of ice it is possible for food to raise to an unsafe temperature while the ice is still melting
This "trick" should not be used in place of proper temperature monitoring
They don't lower the internal temperature of the freezer. The frost generally forms first on the evaporator unit and that is the part that is heated periodically to remove the ice buildup. It's possible for ice to build up elsewhere in the freezer but the air is circulated and the remaining ice generally sublimates away. This wouldn't cause your food or a bag of ice to melt, but it will cause your ice cubes to shrink over time and will freezer burn your frozen food.
In my experience, food in self-defrosting freezers doesn't outright spoil quickly enough to be a practical concern, though I'm sure it does technically allow for stuff to grow faster.
What it does do, though, is get freezer burned very quickly.
For a moment, I though this was about my video and article, but reading the comments, it's more about everyone sharing their stories. Few of the comments reflect having read the article. Fair enough, sometimes it just takes a link to give theme for a discussion.
If I've learnt anything from reading Hacker News for a few years it's that I would take this as a compliment that the article did a good in covering any aspect we might be curious about and answer any questions we might have had. For example the fact that you did the experiment with an empty and full freezer and with empty boxes vs food pretty much preempts any nit-picks you might get from people in this this thread.
Hi Matthias. I'm a long-time fan of your projects and website. Built myself a bandsaw thanks to your plans, played around with imgcomp just the other day, etc.
But one thing I've noticed about HN comments is that they are almost always _tangential_ to the content being linked rather than directly about the content itself. I saw this happen the one or two times my own blogging hit the front page. I suspect a large percentage of users simply head straight to the comments section to tell their own story. (Or, unfortunately, to find something to argue with someone else about.)
I read the article with interest. Thanks for taking the time.
My father-in-law forever refused to buy an upright freezer because "as soon as you open the door, all the cold air falls out." Which I now know to be only partially correct.
I am a fan of your site and appreciate your thoughtful writing, but I found that I could not get very far through this article on mobile (and I usually read HN on mobile, not desktop). The problem is the layout. The font is small, and if you zoom in, it does not wrap.
I have noticed this is the past, it's not the first time that one of your articles has been linked on Hacker News. And I always thought it was strange, because you appear to use very minimal CSS styling, that word-wrapping would not work properly "out of the box".
Looking at this page now (on my laptop) I see that everything is inside of a fixed width (1150px) table, so that explains it.
Have you thought about changing your pages to use a more mobile-friendly setup, like a flexbox layout?
I imagine now that you have hundreds of pages and years of content under your belt (quite an impressive site!) it might be difficult to make such a change on all of your content!
For what it's worth op, I'd be happy to help script out a process for extracting your old content into a new format (something like markdown so you can use whatever site generator tickles your fancy) and it's one I've scripted a few times before. Feel free to drop me an email.
It depends on the thermal mass of the contents, the effectiveness of the insulation, and the external ambient environmental temperature.
In real world use, it also generally depends on (1) how frequently and for how long you open it, and (2) whether it's top-loading (efficient) versus front-loading (inefficient).
Source: My venture custom designed and built a refrigeration circuit with autonomous electronic management from scratch over the last year or so, so have done numerous recent tests in this space. I also visited about 4 different fridge factories in Guangdong and spoke to their engineers, investigated the different available chemical coolants, relevant sensors, etc.
It's probably a web 3.0/IoT way of saying an ESP8266 with a couple of sensors and a relay. From there you could do some slightly smart stuff like observe the rate of warming towards ambient when idle (i.e. determine the volume of material in the freezer) to determine how long you can go without running the compressor. And from there you could manipulate the thermostat's target depending on current and future predicted electricity prices.
With a load sensor attached to the tub, you could determine when a substantial volume of new material has been added and preemptively run the compressor hard for a bit.
Many things are possible. Most of them not worth the complexity.
Well, theoretically you could just use 3-phase motors, right? I'd actually like that, and over here in Germany, most homes have a 3-phase supply in the kitchen for an electric stovetop.
More efficient than single-phase. In this case, it makes the inverter redundant, because the inverter's only purpose is to produce a 3-phase AC supply for the motor.
Have you seen how long this setup takes before it'll trigger a change? Ive left glasses of frozen water to thaw and they most definitely don't thaw evenly. They also take way more time to thaw than any regular food product due to the significant heat/surface area ratio difference.
I wish my freezer wuld have spare space for mug filled with water
I keep my freezer at least 90-95% (you may think 5-10% is enough for cup, but it's just small flat space available among drawers) full pretty much all the time, it keeps it running at highest efficiency and also you have always maximum available amount of food in case of lockdown for instance
> When opening an empty upright freezer, all the cold air can just "fall out"
I recently found that the ice-cream refrigerators of street vendors (and everything else that is being sold when the doors are frequently opened) are opening on the top for that exact reason - to not let cold air "fall out" (because cold air is on the bottom)
This is also why the Trader Joe’s freezer/refrigerator section is designed the way it is. Turns out that a chest freezer/refrigerator with no top on it at all isn’t that much worse than a standing freezer/refrigerator with a door that gets opened and closed over and over again.
Most normal supermarkets in Europe either have upright doors (more common if space is limited) or open chests. The open chests are covered when the shop is closed.
The budget supermarkets tend to have chests with a transparent sliding door on top.
In germany the sliding top door is standard in almost all supermarkets, ranging from ALDI to Edeka, it covers "normal" and "budget" supermarkets. The only places I see non-transparent doors is bulk supermarkets.
I find it weird that his new freezer has open compartments. Mine, and the majority a quick google search showed, have boxes with the opening on top in each compartment, you can slide out. I don't have the numbers but my intuition says that it's more energy efficient.
also why when i buy ice cream i go for the one on the bottom of the shelf. it's the place with the most stable temperature- as the top area can fluctuate in temperature with people opening and closing the door.
A test with the freezer as full as possible with just water would be interesting as a best-case set of data points to compare against.
I always keep containers full of water in the bowels of my refrigerators/freezers only removing them when the space is required for food. There's not much sense in keeping empty volumes of air in a refrigerated space.
When there's no airflow in the refrigerator, then it takes a long time to chill food, the reverse of how a blast chiller can chill food really quickly by moving lots of air. But maybe the water chills the air to make up for this, IDK. It would be interesting to experiment.
It's like pre-loading your refrigerator/freezer with a sack of ice. If your power goes out long enough for your food to spoil, what will you do? Well, maybe you'll go buy some sacks of ice to throw in there until the power turns back on.
Ok, if you have the space to spare, why wait for the failure to go fetch the emergency ice? Just fill the empty space with ballast water and you're ahead of the problem.
Once the thermal mass is at the desired temperature, it will help bring newly introduced items to the desired temperature faster, not slower.
The only time it slows down the cooling is when first introduced @ a warmer temp, or when there's been a failure for long enough to let everything warm up. But note that in the failure scenarios, the thermal mass helps keep the space cool for longer than had it not been there. Just remove the warmed ballast when the failure is over to let the perishables re-cool first, then reintroduce the ballast when appropriate ... perhaps even pre-cooling it elsewhere first.
Practically all of your food has a thaw point that’s below the thaw point of ice. The energy absorbed in the phase transition of ice to water massively eclipses the energy to heat up the same amount of water by one degree. In effect, all your food will protect your newly acquired ice from melting.
You want something that has a thaw point way below your foods thaw point - add salt t your ice.
I had never thought about this but you're right. Big frozen water/soda bottles of ice still increase the overall thermal mass and will almost certainly slow full thawing. Otherwise, ice blocks in a cooler wouldn't work.
But you're really better off adding salt to those bottles so they absorb energy when melting below the freezing point of pure water (and frozen food).
While that's true, since the current topic of this conversation is about emergency preparedness, I think having potable water (in ice form) would be much preferable to salted water.
It’s substantially more efficient to store a pack of bottled water or two on top of your fridge - and keep your food at the same time. Water keeps well even if not frozen.
If you want to keep tap water, you can buy silver ion additives at any camping/outdoor store. If you’re really planning for preparedness, buy a ceramic water micro filter and additives. That can make nearly all water usable.
I can say that if I load up my fridge, especially the top it will freeze up the fan and stop working altogether. Airflow is essential if you have a poorly designed Samsung where it’s a common problem to ice over.
I tend to chuck in a handful of ice cubes into my gazpacho, it doesn't dilute the mass all that much and really helps with the blender warming up the soup.
Why might I want to chill drinks quickly? Because I (or someone) want(s) a chilled drink, and forgot to put it in earlier, or it was only just bought/arrived.
I've known people keep celebratory champagne permanently chilled in case of an unexpected call for it; I semi-frequently put beer or white wine in the freezer for 15-30mins ish because I didn't think to put it in the fridge earlier (or had to take them out to make room something more critically needing to be kept cool).
I don't think this should matter though? In theory the longer amount of time it would take to cool down would be countered by the length of time the compressor needs to run to cool it down. Unless you factor in some minimum amount of time the compressor runs for, which probably isn't too unreasonable.
Water has a much higher heat capacity than water, and obviously much higher density too. By filling freezer space with water, the thermal mass of the freezer goes up, and it will stay cold for longer in a power outage.
I keep soda/water bottles in a secondary downstairs freezer. They're my ice packs for throwing in coolers. (This, of course, makes more sense if you have more than a primary refrigerator/freezer).
Small fridges sometimes have an icebox inside them, which is a different thing to a fridge/freezer which actually has a separate door, or a dedicated freezer. The icebox is just a part of the fridge compartment, weakly insulated from the rest of the compartment, and the cooling plate is located inside the icebox. The rest of the fridge is kept cool mainly from cold leaking out the icebox.
You'd be better off having lidded containers with no water. Since it stops the air loss every time it's opened. But you don't lose the energy when you take them out.
Water is ~ 1000 times heaver than air so for a fridge, removing the water is the same as letting out air 1000 times.
Freezer is worse because there is also the phase change in the water. But having ice is useful.
It depends what you're optimizing for. If you're primarily interested in resilience to power outages, then maybe you are OK with the wasted energy used to freeze/re-freeze the extra water.
Water is not a good choice to optimize for this. Most energy from the ambient air gets consumed at the thawing point of the medium - 0 degrees for water. So water/ice will keep freezer at 0 degrees for longer, but that’s not an attractive goal for a freezer - you want some cooling medium that does the phase change at a colder temperature (adding copious amounts of salt to the water would go a long way)
Professional cooler packs can have that point down as far as -35 Celsius.
Yeah well, water is practically free, readily available, relatively benign if it leaks, and can be a hydrating life-saver in a pinch. So it's a pretty good option as something other than air.
Keep in mind that everything with some amount of sugar or salt has a thaw point below 0 degrees. Practically all of your food will have thawed by the point the ice melts - so you’re dumping a lot of energy into freezing water that will be mostly useless at the point disaster strikes.
Adding salt to your water will substantially lower the thawing point and it’s still cheap and widely available.
If you want to prep for cases when you need water you’d be better off keeping your freezer cold with a suitable medium and have a few 30liter buckets of water with some sort of additive that prevents spoilage (silver ions for example) or have some packs of bottled water around.
This is an extremely interesting question, both from a scientific and a practical point of view, but the article doesn't really answer it at all.
He starts by measuring the temperature in the freezer, but then puts a realistic amount of food in it and doesn't want to let the food go bad. So he makes an extrapolation from the warming between -18 and -11, but immediately points out (fairly) that the extrapolation is not really valid. Then he answers a completely different question - how much cold is lost when you open the door. The answer to that is also quite dubious and of limited applicability.
The experiment I would like to see is this: fill a freezer (or a couple of different types of freezer) X% (where X could be 50, 80, 100) with a mix of different frozen foods, including ice cream, meat, vegetables, cooked meals, bread. Turn the power off. Every day, open the freezer briefly, long enough to retrieve some of your samples, maybe some from the top/front and some from the bottom/back. Then tell us, for a few types of food and location in the freezer, what day did the food thaw enough that you wouldn't want to refreeze it? What day did the food become less than perfect if consumed immediately? What day did the food become inedible?
People can put up with different levels of yickiness so you'd want descriptions more than numbers here.
You want the contents to remain BELOW 0C, not hovering at 0C while everything melts.
You can do this by adding some salt-water bottles, which have a lower melting point, and will therefore absorb a lot of heat (heat of fusion) well below 0C. Eg add 250g salt/liter gives melting point of -18C.
Of course you waste some space on useless salt water vs potable - maybe there are better alternatives, eg fruit juice? Milk? Honey?
I'd have to do the calculations but wouldn't you be better off with a solution that just barely froze at freezer temps? Because of latent heat of melting? i.e. you want it to freeze--just at as low a temperature as possible given the freezer temperature.
Your basic point makes sense to me though of course thawing isn't even.
ADDED:
Doing the calculation. It takes 334 joules to melt 1g of water vs. about 4 joules to raise that same gram of liquid water 1 degree. Freezer temp is supposed to be about -18 degrees Celsius.
So the latent heat of melting is a bigger deal than a few degrees of raising liquid temperature. So you should have ice packs maybe somewhere in the -10 degree range which is what I assume commercial ice packs do.
Completely saturated salty water freezes right around -6F or -21C. And most home freezers are set to right around that for energy conservation reasons, but max out even lower. So you could use any briny water and it will phase change before your food melts.
I'm surprised a 12v based deep freezer that runs off a reasonably sized solar panel is not more popular/affordable. With the right amount of thermal mass, and good insulation, and a small battery you could greatly extend how long your food stays cold. There are a lot of people who live in places where snowy weather or high winds and loss of power is an eventuality. In an emergency losing your food is a bigger concern than just the cost of the food.
Or go a bit higher end and put a larger solar and battery instalation with an inverter that can power the whole house. As solar panels and lithium batteries come down in cost that's becoming increasingly attractive for rural areas where the grid is flaky the best of times.
12V/120V freezers do exist and are marketed towards RV, camping, and off grid markets. Disadvantage is they tend to be smaller, cost more. But they are very efficient. Where a residential freezer might draw a couple of hundred watts dual voltage fridges draw 25-50 watts. And automatically switch between 12VDC and 120VAC. So they can be connected to both shore power and a battery at the same time and it 'just works'
There are also propane fridges/freezers but they are also smaller. (Though at the point where you have a large propane tank, you could arguably just as well have a backup generator.)
My impression is the big advantage of absorption fridges is they will run off a tank of propane for a long time. But Downside they are very slow to cool down and running off AC/DC they aren't very efficient.
But yeah cheapest thing to do is get a furnace transfer switch and a generator. That seems to be how rural people in the upper midwest avoid freezing to death when the power goes out in the winter.
>Seems like ice is a better choice? The phase transition requires a huge amount of energy.
Why are you excluding the phase transition energy of the brine? Presumably you can calibrate the salinity so it freezes at around say... -15C, and set your freezer to -18C. That way it's absorbing heat more heat when it's colder, which is helpful if you want to keep your food frozen. The latent heat of water isn't of use to you if all your meat is already thawed.
That's the point! The brine is frozen at -19c and liquid at - 17c which is well below the freezing point of everything else in the freezer.
Or you can have normal water which is frozen at -1c and liquid at 1c. Your pick.
The handy thing about the brine is that its absorbs heat at a temperature below that which everything else thaws. So as the brine thaws it keeps your freezer at -18c which means everything in it is still frozen.
Of course, you need to choose a salt % that gives a melting point just above the temperature you want to keep everything else, so that the salt water is normally frozen.
I mentioned -18C because that is the recommended minimum temperature for freezers such that some foods can last almost indefinitely; certain chemical reactions are completely shut down.
Isn't the freezing temp of vodka too low? I've kept vodka in the freezer, and it never actually freezes. In order to get the benefit described during a power outage, you need something that will be frozen at normal freezer temps, but will melt before the food starts thawing.
The latent heat of alcohol is also only about 1/3 that of water per unit mass, so not a very dense way of storing energy, even if you were to freeze it.
Adding salt to water reduces the latent heat density too (pure water is hard to beat there), but not as much as adding alcohol does.
When we went on our honeymoon my mother in law came around and left our freezer full of delicious meat, fish all sorts. But then inexplicably turned off the freezer electricity switch on her way out.
2 weeks later my little sister cane around to leave us some milk in the fridge for our return. Only to find the entire kitchen wreaking of rotting meat and water and other crap all over the floor.
She cleaned it up without even telling us - plus did I mention she’s a vegetarian and hates the smell of meat.
Not even - it was inside a little electrics box with switches for the cooker, dishwasher, washing machine and things like that which you don’t ever really turn off unless you’re replacing them. The one outlier is that the extractor fan is also in there and maybe that’s why she thought she needed to turn those things off.
Tropical Storm Isaias hit my area last week with tornados (which has been really rare.) and power went out for a few days.
Our local utility company actually has a FAQ / Tips page[1] to answer this question. It appears that the information was sourced from CDC[2] and American Red Cross[3].
I was just looking at getting a NG generator installed for my parents on the east coast, after watching these recent storms come through. I'd dawdled on this for years, because it was just infrequent enough.
Anyway, I also looked at battery backup systems (Tesla, Enphase, etc). Unfortunately, it seems they haven't reached cost competitiveness with the plain old gas generator yet. Not a lot of power density (time), and too expensive for the benefit in noise/fumes/etc. $15000 for 2-3 days worth of backup, compared to $5000 for installing a Kohler run of the mill NG unit, etc.
I was disappointed -- was hoping that batteries were further along than they are. Anyway, I'm sure there's going to be a run on getting these installed for the next few months, so clearly there's plenty of time to think it over.
You may be able to get back some of the difference by requiring less total power from your utility and thus lowering the power availability part of the electric bill that applies all day and all year. It's also possible to time shift energy from lower cost times to higher cost ones if you can get time of day billing. And then there's solar of course. I wouldn't be surprised that having that 5k in extra benefit from the system tipped the scales for a battery+solar system in a lot of places with a modest cost of capital.
An inverter that runs off the 12V battery in your car is very cheap. Get one, and an extension cord, and you have an emergency power source to cool down your freezer every few days.
This is the approach I am taking (bought inverter, will test it out next weekend). I don't think you can really run this off the battery (it will be on the order of 1000 watts): instead you need to have the car turned on and will be essentially running it off the inverter. So it's essentially an inefficient gas-powered generator that you already have on-hand and you need to make sure you have some gas in the tank.
That's one thing that's annoying in the current crop of EVs. Almost none of them support drawing power from the cars even though they have those huge batteries just standing there. I understand not wanting to add the cost of the inverter to every car but it seems it should be relatively straightforward to support external inverters that plug into the DC part of the CCS connector.
I think it's because the car companies don't want people meddling, draining their car batteries with poor power management and degrading the lifetime, and then coming to them and asking them to repair the damage.
Years ago, I installed a Tripp Lite inverter/charger along with two 120AH deep cycle marine batteries - all sitting on top of my fridge. I calculated that I can get a few days of power. Also have another 1500w inverter for emergencies. And I always ensure vehicles are complete full before any large storms. Losing all your cold food is expensive!
Related ... the last time I was in the market for a chest freezer (a "deep freeze") I wanted one that showed a log of temperature over time ...
This, essentially, does not exist. It appears that there are laboratory freezers that support this (very simple) feature, but they are relatively small and very expensive.
A better way to go is an electricity monitor on the plug, where you track electrical power over time and assume (reasonably) that full electrical power implies full temperature control.
Still ... a simple log of temperature over time (without resorting to weird solutions with raspis dangling temp wires into the freezer ...) would be a very nice feature and I'm disappointed that it doesn't exist ...
This is going to sound a little overkill, but I do have some experience in this area, and this is the right forum for it so...
Digital thermometers for freezers are relatively cheap (if you don't need them NIST traceable, anyway) and easy to get from any number of laboratory catalogues (See, for example, Thermo-Fisher or Cole-Parmer). You can even purchase a chart recorder that'll sit on top of your freezer if you want!
If you're just concerned about brown-outs and fluctuations, you can go with a cheap, magnetic max/min like the Cole-Parmer Jumbo (fine for consumer freezers) that sits on the front of the unit. You need to thread the wires through the freezer door, though, unless you're lucky enough to have a port on the side or back.
If you want a boatload of data you can go all out with a digital datalogger with a Type T thermocouple (Type T will even work reliably on -80C ULT freezers). I highly recommend Onset Hobos for reliability. There are also bluetooth and wifi models that allow you to get the data to your devices. As an aside, stay away from Oakton as a brand if you're doing anything mission critical.
If you don't want the wires sticking through the doors, I've had good success mapping temps with the Thermochron ibuttons - they are the size of a watch battery and some models work down to -40C. If you set the frequency low (e.g. every hour) they'll log data for months before you need to pull them. You can also get waterproof enclosures for them and throw them in the dishwasher for fun!
I had this very discussion on Twitter a few days ago, wrt "smart" refrigerators. The one thing that would be legitimately useful would be a batter back real time clock and thermometer, to alert you when the power went out, and what to throw away. I'd be shocked if this feature exists on any refrigerator. Not because it's difficult (It's not. Just monitor the temperature and print a stock FDA guidance), but because it's not what a product manager actually thinks of. Instead we get cameras inside, weather, Alexa integration, Google photos, just... bullshit features. Nothing that that anyone really needs.
My wife was convinced the refrigerator was failing so I bought a few sensor tags from wirelesstag.net [1] just to be sure. You can certainly build your own using off-the-shelf IOT devices, but for ~$35 you can have a device that senses temperature, humidity, light levels,and runs for several months off an easily replaced cr2032. Although to be fair you must buy a base sensor station for $39 along with the first tag.
Having said that, it definitely gives me peace of mind knowing that my fridge isn't going out and that I haven't left the door open, either.
Next on the agenda is using my smart home controller to adjust cooling temperature on my window unit based on ambient temperature in my bedroom.
I looked at the product page for the wireless sensor and I saw this:
>No subscription fee of any kind for life; no monthly or annual fee to use cloud service and no cloud storage fee for data collected by sensor tags.
>High anonymity: only your account email address and tag manager IP address is collected
That sounds... slightly disturbing. It suggests the tags sends all the data to the manufacturer's server. That's bad from a privacy and reliability (eg. company goes bust in a few years) perspective.
Such data might be interesting to look at, but as long as the freezer does its job (aka keep everything stored within it fully frozen), what's the point in having that data?
In normal, day to day life, I think it would have little value.
The use-case I am envisioning here is: you have a high value store of frozen items (meat, etc.) and you leave your home for 20 or 30 days ...
When you get back, the freezer is running nicely and everything is frozen and things look great - but what if there were a 3 or 4 or 5 day power outage in the middle of your trip that thawed things out just enough to spoil ?
Or what if there were one or more power outages (or brownouts) that you were aware of that were not, in fact, long enough to ruin your stored food ... but how would you be sure ?
If you had a time view of freezer temps you could make those determinations easily.
Keep in mind that while They’re not overly expensive, it’s pretty easy to pack a few thousand dollars worth of food in a chest freezer. Might be worth testing it...
You could just freeze a cup of water, and then stick a penny in top of it. If you ever come back to find your penny embedded or at the bottom of the cup, you know your freezer thawed out at some point
My apartment has what appears to be the worst refrigerator ever made. It's a cheap GE unit with a single temperature control. You have to choose between freezer burnt steaks or frozen milk. I used that temp logger to confirm what was going on.
Freeze cup of water with some red food coloring in it. Turn upside down. If you ever come back to a freezer that looks like it’s covered in frozen blood you’ll know.
I always heard this as an upright cup of frozen water with a penny on top. If you come home and the penny is inside the ice you know the freezer went out.
I personally think the raspi approach is fine. If you want off the shelf, there are temperature and humidity loggers that are cheap. They’re typically wifi based and host a webpage. Some even come with probes so you don’t need to have the antenna inside a Faraday cage.
> without resorting to weird solutions with raspis dangling temp wires into the freezer ...
Well, I had a solution up till that line. There's gotta be an elegant way to set something like that up on top of the fridge out of sight with clean cable management into the freezer.
If you're going to bother--especially with a chest freezer--you probably want a number of temperature probes anyway. Just because there's been some thawing at the top/front doesn't mean that everything has thawed.
that's a great DIY project for an esp8266 and a temperature probe. Could even be a kickstarter. Everyone with kids worries about them leaving a fridge or freezer open.
Also works great when going to multi-day music festivals with no power on the campground. We always buy some 20kg or so of dry ice blocks, a big styrofoam box full of it, and move a block over to the cooler containing the beer every few hours. Works great for up to 5 or 6 days.
Also, putting little bits of the ice blocks directly into drinks makes for a cool fog effect in addition to keeping your gin tonic at refreshing temperature.
How do you safely handle dry ice? I'm legitimately asking, I know retailers sell it with big warning labels but I wouldn't know how to transport it, move it, and similar.
First thing you do when you get your slab is that you wrap it in two towels, then you fold down the loose edges and pop that in a cooler. Towels towels towels, that's my go-to.
You can handle dry ice with your bare hands -- I have scores of times -- the trick is that contact with pressure (squeezing or weight) is what is going to give you frostbite. Otherwise, I have swiftly moved two pound chunks with bare hands if I were lazy. Any pair of winter or driving gloves is sufficient so long as the fingertips aren't open. Just leather gloves are dandy.
Now, if you're feeling fearful, you can drive with the windows down, but to be honest, carbon dioxide in too high of quantities will invoke a gasping/coughing reflex. You would have plenty of warning. You can verify this by putting a small chunk of dry ice in water, leaning over the cup, and inhaling. You'll cough, and that is the reflex to look far. It isn't shy about making itself known. I have driven around with fifty pounds of dry ice in coolers with no issues.
Now that you've driven home, you can take the dry ice, towels and all, and put one in the freezer, one or two in the fridge. Now, this stuff sublimates, so you won't have water everywhere, but don't worry about pressure building up in the two compartments, you'd have to use straps to hold the doors down tight enough to be an issue. I put the dry ice at the top of each compartment, as a trend.
It'll save your refrigerator's worth full of food.
> Now, if you're feeling fearful, you can drive with the windows down, but to be honest, carbon dioxide in too high of quantities will invoke a gasping/coughing reflex. You would have plenty of warning. You can verify this by putting a small chunk of dry ice in water, leaning over the cup, and inhaling. You'll cough, and that is the reflex to look for.
The mechanisms that regulate your breathing use carbon dioxide levels as their only input. One side effect of this is that you'll happily suffocate to death, never realizing anything is wrong, breathing a gas that contains no oxygen -- as long as it also contains no carbon dioxide.
A happier side effect is that you will definitely detect, and feel very unhappy about, inappropriately high levels of carbon dioxide.
You will have quite some intellectual effects before you start coughing. In fact, where we are going with adding co2 to the atmosphere, people will be measurably dumber in 50 years.
Yes, really. Indoors we can easily get as high co2 levels as 1000ppm (starting from 400 something which we have outside now). That has in various studies been connected to upwards of 30% in cognitive decline in some tests like decision making. Simpler tests are also affected, but not as much. Here's an article about a Harvard study: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-lev...
Dry ice in the car without the windows down seems like a bad idea.
You don't really notice 1000ppm, and unless you have some ventilation going you can probably reach that quite quickly in your car. I am not saying that it didn't work out or that it was reckless. Just make sure you have adequate ventilation.
Exactly: 5000ppm means significantly worse decision making and crisis response. How much more co2 does sublimating dry ice put out? Well packaged probably not that much, but certainly more than another person breathing beside you.
One note: if it behaves like dry ice in a cooler does, it can carbonate many of your food items. I've used dry ice on camping trips and ended up with carbonated fruit.
I would calculate what it would bear in terms of recarbonation, get the flat soda very cold (carbon dioxide enters solution preferentially at lower temperatures), weigh, drop, cap, and roll it down a hill. If no explosion, wait a couple of minutes just for safety.
It is not super dangerous stuff. You can (and should not) juggle it bare handed briefly without ill effect. One thing to consider is dry ice is frozen CO2. Camping, it was a clever way to pack in our steaks without having a watery mess. What we figured out, was the mosquitos are attracted to CO2. The poor guy with the food pack had a cloud of blood suckers around him every portage.
A normal cooler works fine. Something that seals and could build pressure would be problematic.
Dry ice is really easy to handle. If you don't swallow it, the main danger is letting it sublimate in an enclosed space as that'll fill said space with CO2, but we are very sensitive to CO2 levels (unlike CO or N2) so the danger is low there, just don't be a complete moron.
Seriously, dry ice sublimates so when you hold a block or pieces unless you actually grip the thing, the layer of sublimating CO2 protects your hand rather well. Use gloves or tools if you're going to move large amounts (e.g. dozens of blocks by hand, or pellets by the literal fistful) both to protect your hand and to avoid wasting your dry ice more than necessary.
But as far as "dangerous" things go, dry ice is really low on the scale.
The biggest danger is putting too much in a completely sealed and locked environment as the sublimation will cause significant expansion, increase in pressure, and therefore a possible explosion.
Typically wherever you buy it they will have small Styrofoam coolers next to it. It typically comes sealed in thin plastic bags. Get it home, put on a glove, and throw it in your freezer. Any glove is fine as long as you're not standing there with it in your hand. There are several grocery stores that have it available here.
Wear gloves when handling it-- don't touch it with bare skin. Store it in insulated containers, but don't seal it in an airtight container. Maintain adequate ventilation. It will sink to the floor and displace oxygen.
Other people are giving good advice, but you should also know that it isn't that dangerous. People have died from the fumes, but only when they have a lot of dry ice in an enclosed area (e.g. a car). It can cause explosions, but that's mostly from people going out of their way to build bombs. It can cause burns, but not instantly and the pain will warn you before you get seriously injured.
Don't be particularly afraid. It's not hard to handle.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Last week the power was out Tuesday 2 pm until Friday 8 pm, 78 hours. I left the lid shut on a 7 cubic foot chest freezer in the garage, where the ambient was in the 70s F most of the time due to the cool weather. When the power came back on, the temperature was about 37 degrees at the top of the freezer. Ice cream in the second layer down had a light bit of crystallization, but no other obvious defects. Other food will be evaluated before being eaten, but it should be safe since it was below or at normal refrigerator temperature, although texture may suffer due to being refrozen.
The solution for this is to buy a generator. Hand started 1 kW ones go for ~130€ these days (https://toom.de/p/inverter-strom-generator-sg-1200/1501059), plus enough cable from <somewhere outdoor> to <location of fridge>. That's enough for 24/7 running the fridge and any other important appliances (think a TV/radio and a cellphone charger to have access to some form of information/communication).
Don't even need to keep a jerrycan around and risk the fuel go stale if you know how to siphon fuel from your car in an emergency (for a widespread outage, it is not guaranteed that gas stations are operational). Only requirement is to check oil level and start them up and run for at least half an hour once a quarter (you might get away with half a year).
PSA: Do not, never ever, even dream about putting that generator indoors unless you have a certified chimney sweep (or whatever your regional equivalent is) certify the safety of the exhaust system. And even if you do (or have any other sort of fuel furnace in the house), get at least a CO warner at the most bottom place of your house!
The temp curves may be non-linear, so I'm not convinced about the extrapolation from just a few hours.
I get not wanting to spoil food -- but why didn't he try with, say, jugs of water? Easy way to fill the freezer, great thermal mass, and probably a decent approximation of freezable goods.
I operate 5 inexpensive chest freezers 4 hours a day on a solar microgrid system. 4 hours is enough to keep them frozen hard, as long as they are full. I use water bottles to fill any extra space.
If you put a lot of stuff in them at a time, they will need to be run overnight (>12hrs) to freeze them down hard. If you do not freeze the contents completely at first, it may not ever freeze, because if it doesn't store the latent energy of freezing the freezer won't have enough thermal inertia to remain below freezing during the 20 hours of rest.
On very rainy periods, we can go about 48 hours from the end of the last freeze cycle before any significant melting occurs.
Note, it doesn't just require an outage to stop the freezer working.
Many modern freezers ironically stop working properly under low (but above freezing) room temperatures encountered in unheated rooms (eg outbuildings, garages, etc) in colder climates.
During an extended power outage you can add quite a bit of time by wrapping the freezer in more insulation. Anything will do; fibreglass insulation, quilts, blankets.
You'll be shocked at how cold the inside of the blanket gets.
Thawed vs unthawed isn't a bool. You're really interested in the long-term safety of the food, and that starts to decrease as temperatures start to increase.
-18C/0F is the point at which most pathogens are forced to hibernate and bacterial cultures stop growing. But they don't die, and they'll start to revive at higher temperatures - which means they'll begin to spread if there's a regular thaw/freeze cycle, even in a freezer that spends some of its time at -18C/0F.
You’re not wrong, but at that point it’s basically just an ice chest—a bunch of ice will keep perishables cold, whether it’s in a fridge or a portable cooler or whatever. Not as efficient, maybe, but a modern fridge is already quite efficient at retaining coolness, so I don’t see why this isn’t a permanent solution!
I actually went through this last week. The problem is that, if the power goes out (presumably without advance warning), a bunch of triage to basically turn your freezer into a cooler for critical items is going to cost a bunch of the stored cold air.
I'd probably go instead, if you have a cooler, with buying a few bags of ice if you can and quickly pulling out high value/especially perishable items and putting them in the cooler.
You don't have to be so quick about it. The heat capacity from warm air coming inside is dwarfed by that of the frozen solids and especially their latent heat absorbed during the melting process.
You're right. If things had gone on much longer, I'd probably at least have tossed a few bags of ice in my main freeze. (Probably better than pulling stuff out and so forth.)
This depends entirely on one's situation. I could easily get as much ice as I wanted from a nearby river, should the need arise during winter time. During summers, it'd be pretty much impossible to get hold of sufficient quantities.
All else being the same, the more mass in in the freezer, the less that a given inflow of heat will warm it. If 10 heat units enter, they will warm 10 kg of uniform contents much less than 100kg.
If you have extra space, using it to store something dense that has a high specific heat and is inexpensive is easy: use ice. (Glaciers take a -long- time to melt!)
If society and food supply chains had actually broken down due to a massive pandemic (imagine ebola with a 30% fatality rate tearing through a population of 350+ million in the USA and Canada) you would have been much better served by a stockpile of rice, beans, canned food, multivitamins and other true disaster supplies.
A lot of people panic buying early on weren't really thinking things through. They were stocking up months of canned food and rice but many weren't stocking up on fuel, they were buying a few gallons of bottle water rather than big containers to fill with water, and I assume many weren't stocking up on ammo--which may be controversial but if we're positing societal collapse...
I'm a little unclear on how one efficiently uses a generator to power highly intermittent loads like fridge/freezer.
Does one monitor the freezer temperature, and when it starts warming start the generator, then wait for the freeze compressor stops, and then turn off the generator?
Or does one keep the generator running all the time, so between times of the freezer running the generator is idling?
The second option is certainly more convenient, but seems like it would waste fuel while idling. The first option would last longer--but the generator is supposed to be kept away from the house and it could get annoying to have to keep going out to start and stop it.
Run genny to cool freezer, refrigerator, UPS batteries,
and all rechargeable devices. Stop genny overnight,
or when all is cooled or recharged. Repeat as needed.
The less expensive generators may run at a constant
speed, regardless of wattage load, so there may be no
concept of “idling”. Thermal mass as jugs of water,
or bags of water ice (if available) is a win.
As another commenter says, the freezer isn't the only device that could be powered in an outage.
Also, in Canada, when you run a generator in a power outage, after awhile you have neighbours who appear with long extension cables. Which is fair, because the generator is noisy, and there are periods of excess capacity.
Also some neighbors will appear with gasoline because, during a power outage, you can't buy gas.
Problem is, freezers typically run 40% of the time. If you let it get up to -10C, the duty cycle will be a fair bit lower, but still quite high, while only drawing about 100 watts.
But that's a lot of money to spend protecting food hoarding. Dry goods would be better for emergency cases.
The idea is more, if the freezer contains between CAD 1,000 and CAD 2,700 worth of food, how to keep it viable and not lose everything in a 1.75+ standard deviation power outage.
I think what parent is saying is that buying that much food "just in case" and then having to buy generator backup because you now have such an investment in that food is expensive insurance. Personally, I did buy some extra frozen food early on when grocery stores were pretty wiped out but nothing remotely like that.
What makes me periodically think about a generator is a sustained outage in freezing temperatures in winter. Given that more or less the worst that can happen in summer is I have to throw out a bunch of food, I'm not sure the generator makes sense.
"we avoid opening the fridge and freezer to keep the cold inside."
Technically, you cannot keep the cold inside because cold is a word for the absence of warmth (energy), so you're actually trying to keep the warmth outside.
Words indicating the absence of something (cold, darkness, ...) are called privatives.
Here's what I've learned about refrigerators recently.
My fridge is failing in a revealing way. It has an automatic defrost unit- this means that it heats the evaporator coils in the freezer every so often (I think it's once every 36 hours) to melt the frost off of them, producing the same condensation you normally get from an A/C. So where does this water go? Well there is a hose from the freezer to a pan underneath the fridge. There is a cooling fan for the condenser coils there which can dip into this pan. The idea is to use this water to help cool the condenser coils, making the fridge a little more efficient.
Anyway, so the failure has to do with the management of this condensation water. When it's not working, you get a puddle of water in the bottom of the fridge compartment which eventually leaks out to the floor. First thing to check- is the hose clogged? Yes it is, washed it out, but problem still happens. Next thing to check- behind the back wall of the freezer you find the evaporator coils. At the bottom is some cheap metal called the "drain trough". It is a funnel that leads the condensation into the hose. This is where the planned obsolescence comes into play. I'm convinced that the manufactures make this metal out of steal with just the tiniest amount of galvanization so that it will eventually rot out. I think even plastic would have been a better material.
It's theoretically possible to replace this metal, but consider the work involved: you need to empty the freezer, dry it out, remove the back of it, figure out how to move the evaporator coils out of the way without damaging them, unscrew the trough, and figure out how to wiggle it out. You need to do this at least twice (once to debug the issue in the first place, next to actually replace it). Finally good luck finding the replacement in stock (also add the time needed for this search). The fridge is maybe good for 12 years, but little chance of replacement parts stocked for that long. Certainly this is the case for my fridge, and I fabricated a temporary patch out of rubber.
Also, of course, there is absolutely no way for you to inspect this part before you buy a new fridge. Maybe it's even worse on new fridges, who knows?
> This is where the planned obsolescence comes into play. I'm convinced that the manufactures make this metal out of steal with just the tiniest amount of galvanization so that it will eventually rot out.
One thing I never got about "planned obsolescence" as some sort of way to get more recurring revenue is how it works with competitors. If you're the only game in town then it makes perfect sense, but if your appliance died an early death, are you really going to buy from the same manufacturer? What if another manufacturer doesn't do the same thing and their appliance lasts longer? Wouldn't you lose market share? For it to work you'd need some sort of conspiracy with all the other competitors so everyone cuts quality in unison, which we haven't seen a lot of evidence of. The only one that comes to mind is the lightbulb one.
They make their products fail in non obvious ways and the competitors do the same thing. You won't be able to see the flaws when you buy the product.
Recent example, my parents buy "stainless steel" because they think it is more durable but it's purely cosmetic because of the internal parts. They had a stainless steel microwave that stopped working because the door would not stay shut.
I was able to pry open the framing of the door and located the tension spring that was required to keep the door hooked shut, well it had been attached to the flimsiest plastic tab I could imagine.
Everything else about the microwave worked perfectly fine but because this flimsy 2mm thick plastic tab broke, it was now junk.
So i drilled a hole in the plastic frame and reattached the spring to that hole (which was drilled in a way that made it more stable) and fixed the microwave.
There was literally no increase in cost to anchor this critical tension spring in a less fragile way, in fact I would argue it cost them more to design this special failing piece.
The whole industry is just absurd, the whole way we run the economy is absurd. It only makes sense if you have infinite planets to exploit for resources with infinite room for waste.
I have a Samsung fridge and there is a problem that causes water to pool in the meat/vegetable trays. It's very simple - a tube in the back behind a panel takes run-off under the fridge. But this drain runs past the freezer, so it freezes solid eventually and overflows. It took quite a while to work out the first time but YouTube came to the rescue.
The fix is apparently replacing or extending the stupid little piece of metal they attached that is meant to transfer heat into the pipe. Instead we add a longer copper wire or something that goes deeper and conducts better. Doing this only costs only a few dollars more (currently, I've simply poured hot water down there to unclog it twice in ~6 years but next time it's getting the wire).
Interesting- on mine, this hose is external. There is a fitting that goes all the way through the wall insulation and hose runs along the back of the fridge.
Freezer: 8-cubit feet of space totally full! If you keep the door shut and don't open it the food will last about 12-hours.
This happened to me this week. Use dry ice to keep the food fresh. Dry ice costs $1.00 a pound, you need 25 pounds total, five for the freezer. This solution will work for about 12-hours.
at least half a day is usually safe.
All Appliances sold in EU have this in their data sheet:
‘power cut safe “X” h’ defined as ‘temperature rise time’
Me example from last year:
4h at about 20C Ambient temperture: 4 degree Celsius loss from -20C
Freezer: normal upper level refrigerator freezer chock full of frozen fish caught on holiday in Alaska.
Place, Time: Houston, TX, Late Summer, Hurricane Igor just hit and knocked our power out for 14 days.
Findings: We kept the freezer shut and at about 4-5 days the fish was noticeably thawing and getting flexible. Still cold, but not frozen. I think we might have made an attempt at dry ice but it was too late in the process to matter.
At day 8 or so it had completely defrosted.
At day 10 the smell was so horrendous that if we opened the freezer door we would gag.
At day 14 the power returned. On day 15 or 16 we opened the now cold rotted fish in the freezer and cleaned it out. We vomited multiple times. The smell, despite multiple rounds of bleach, never really went away. The stench permanently inextricable from the lining of the freezer, and the flavor of every ice cube ever made in it from then on.