How long does a freezer stay frozen when the power goes out?
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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.
"Tom, why are you burying fish in your yard? Don't you have better things to be doing like evacuating or collecting fire wood right now?"
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.
The freezer at least contains the smell a bit. That fish outdoors in the heat could start smelling even worse.
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.
But seriously, why not eat BBQ fish every day?
Chest freezer would have had less of an impact, but still noticeable.
Trash doesn't run because trees and lines are down, btw.
Maybe next time try it with a top loaded freezer instead and see what happens.
Sorry about the freezer, but it was in the interest of science.
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.
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.
Unless they have drawers https://pc.vertaa.fi/250x250/102776708.jpg
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.
We also did not open it, of course.
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.
I would not cook on burning pressure treated lumber, but the vast majority of lumber in construction is not pressure treated.
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.
"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.
Hurricane Igor (Sept. 2010) hit Canada, not Houston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Igor
(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 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!”
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.
Good ol government!
It also depends very much on the isolation of the freezer.
And to what temperature it was set.
And of course, how often you 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.
Obviously this advice is strongest in warm areas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soooo many students were like "This fridge is a loss" and would just give them to me.
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.
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.
I wonder if the better solution would be to tip it on a 45 degree angle. If it melts, it will now be flat with gravity. No coin required
It's unclear why you didn't throw it away at this point.
Was it an experiment?
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.
Method #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J8ul-CcrzY
Method #2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCiWk-aIyc
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.
Induction wins everywhere (reproducibility of heat, speed to heat, ease of cleaning...)
The only thing I miss a tiny bit from gas is the ability to tilt a pan to have oil gather in a puddle to deep fry something small.
Other than that everytime I use gas I long for induction.
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.
1: https://www.pcrichard.com/library/blogArticle/induction-vs-g...
[1] https://www.bosch-home.co.uk/product-list/PRA326B70E [2] https://www.bosch-home.co.uk/product-list/PXY675DE3E
I also like the ability to modulate heat very quickly by raising, lowering, or tilting the pan.
I do not remember paying much less before induction, but I do not remember.
This is not a big issue for me, though
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.
Can't toss a wok, and the lack of convection heating means the sides of the wok get pretty cold.
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.
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.
Also, what mjmj said, re:kids.
Not having the fridge readily available in the kitchen would suck, though, so that only works if you have a dedicated freezer.
While this may be OK for single or couple without children, it's hard to imagine it for family with 4+ members.
Planning really isn't that difficult. People do it all the time when they go to the grocery store.
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 :-)
Otherwise fridges and freezers would ship with thicker insulation.
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?
There are specificially designed freezers that can withstand up to -15C ambient temp: https://home.liebherr.com/en/lva/products/household-applianc...
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?
Pity that they are nowhere to be found where I live.
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.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/j3SL_cL0MF9c3ASG-LfR...
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).
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.)
It depends on where you live, and the type of ground underneath you. Where I live, everyone has a basement.
What it does do, though, is get freezer burned very quickly.
This "trick" should not be used in place of proper temperature monitoring
Another poster said use an upside down water bottle, which sounds like an even better option.
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.
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 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!
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.)
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.
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
(https://www.usmint.gov/learn/educators/lesson-spotlight/make...)
Is that a web 2.0 way of saying a thermostat?
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.
I think late 90s/early 2000s was the peak of fridge reliability to efficiency ratio.
They run the defrost timer through the thermostat, so defrost cycles are somewhat inline with fridge use.
The circuitry is simple - a defrost timer, PTC "relay", a few thermostats and the compressor.
Newer fridges are a bit quieter and more efficient with inverter technology, but failure rates are way higher due to electronics failures.
I.e., you can cut the sensitive electronics out.
> while the power is out, for each time the door is opened for five seconds, subtract 7 minutes
> If it were in a hot garage at 30° C, the food would thaw in about 3/4 of the time.
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)
was told that by an ice cream seller.
The budget supermarkets tend to have chests with a transparent sliding door on top.
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.
It is a public health concern at scale.
Two overlapping but divergent scenarios.
(Or gazpacho, thought that might be shot down as a bit niche though. But it is lovely this time of year (in the Northern hemisphere)!)
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).
Nothing to do with food safety though.
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.
You want something that has a thaw point way below your foods thaw point - add salt t your ice.
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).
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.
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.
You would have a larger thermal mass but the same surface area so it should keep for longer.
Professional cooler packs can have that point down as far as -35 Celsius.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
https://fridge0.branchable.com/
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.
Why don’t they do this with the ice blocks you get for keeping food cold on camping trips?
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.
---
Water (liquid) - 4.80 J/g.K
Water (solid) - 2.108 J/g.K (transition 334 J/g)
Brine (liquid, 300g/L) - 2.48 J/g.K
---
So 1 gram of water (s) going from -18C to 0C (liquid) is 373 J.
1 gram of brine (l) going from -18C to 0C is 44.64 J.
Seems like ice is a better choice? The phase transition requires a huge amount of energy.
Brine is 70% more dense than water, so if you do it by volume, one mL of brine would be 76 J, so better, but still only ~1/5 that of pure water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Top marks for my family that day.
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].
[1]: https://nj.pseg.com/outageandgasleaks/duringanoutage/outager...
[2]: https://emergency.cdc.gov/poweroutage/pdf/poweroutage.pdf
[3]: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergen...
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
http://www.elitechlog.com/rc-5usb-temperature-data-logger/
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.
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.
>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.
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!
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...
A normal cooler works fine. Something that seals and could build pressure would be problematic.
Yes, unfortunately, the usual meaning of a concentration of CO2 is that there's an animal nearby exhaling it.
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.
I feel like carbonated fruit would be a treat, but I suspect I might be wrong?
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.
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.
Part of having the stuff wrapped up and insulated is that it isn't sublimating like mad.
Heavy leather work gloves have worked well for me the few times I've needed to load some dry ice into a freezer due to a power cut.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
You'll be shocked at how cold the inside of the blanket gets.
-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.
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.
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!)
Cost of the chest freezer: CAD 1,000
Cost to completely fill the freezer with good food: CAD 2,700
Given that, during a pandemic or a winter storm in Canada, a power failure can be a prolonged event...
Cost of a good gas powered generator to keep the freezer viable beyond a day: CAD 1,000.
This article seems to validate the generator purchase.
Not the collapse of civilization.
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...
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.
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.
The generator is insurance, not a lifeboat.
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.
h/t Terry Pratchett
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?
Edit: check it out, someone else noticed this:
https://medium.com/@michael.grimshaw1/rusted-through-in-four...
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.
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.
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).
https://youtu.be/rwSSMF6Sj70?t=168
Most people seem to use a hair dryer but I just poured hot water in. Probably better to use the hair dryer to avoid overflowing the pan.
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.
worked in insurance company with people claiming broken freezers among other things and you can for sure get through day even in hot weather
of course this won't fly in shops where they have to legally store the products frozen during whole distribution chain
Me example from last year: 4h at about 20C Ambient temperture: 4 degree Celsius loss from -20C
Too bad smart home temperature logging is failing too while power is off: https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1194646175644897281/
He added: "Super snappy on a modern computer!"
Like, if it is half-filled with icepacks versus frozen beef?