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If you can restock the freezer with ice, you can keep it cold for several days easily. Spoken from experience, thanks PG&E.
by baggy_trough 6y ago
If you can restock the freezer with ice, you can keep it cold for several days easily. Spoken from experience, thanks PG&E.
- michaericalribo 6y agoYou’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!
- ghaff 6y agoI 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.
- baggy_trough 6y agoYou 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.
- ghaff 6y agoYou'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.)
- aschatten 6y agoWhere do you get ice if you are out of power?
- ghaff 6y agoYou can easily be out of power and the grocery store a couple miles down the road not be.
- gpm 6y agoYou can buy giant bags of ice really cheap at many gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores, wallmart, etc.
- fullstop 6y agoI got mine from a gas station. They had power but we did not.
- baggy_trough 6y agoSometimes you know in advance that power will be off, so you can freeze extra. Or buy outside.
- menybuvico 6y agoThis 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.