Situation: Power Outage, dealing with cold foods
What are your plans for all that food in the refrigerator in the case of a power outage? Or if your fridge stops working – which is usually about 4 days after the warranty wears out. Many people believe they can just put everything in a cooler – so how big IS your cooler?
This week we’re going to see how realistic our plans are for salvaging the food in the refrigerator.
Pull out your cooler and start loading it up. Do you have room for ice? What are your priorities? What really needs to be kept cool? What can you realistically eat before it goes bad?
Something to consider is having two coolers. One for your more critically cooled items like milk and mayonnaise, and one for items like brick cheese and ketchup. Another thing to consider is that the longer a cooler stays closed the better it retains it’s cooler temperature. With this in mind, it may be best to divide your items according to what will be needed often vs. items which are rarely needed.
This is a deceptively simple challenge. The whole point is to physically check your resources for weaknesses. Besides, this may be a good opportunity to clean out the back of the fridge! Good luck
[...] Wake up Wednesday : The Fridge [...]
In the wake of Hurricane Ike a few years back, our power went out for 12 days solid. A tree came down and took out some of the power lines, and our road and the intersecting road for several miles down had no power. Though my next door neighbors to the west of me, and everyone else on that side of the street still had power. (We’re apparently the end of the line, and another line runs to them. We also have had our power go out an average of 6 times a year, whilst our next door neighbor’s power has gone out twice in twenty years. I don’t think we’re getting a very good deal here…
)
Anyway, we kept our chest freezer and fridge sealed for as long as we could. Once you break the seal, that’s it. It’s all downhill from there. Once we HAD to open it, we then cooked all the food we could. It also gave us a handy opportunity to defrost our freezer which had built up a large ice shelf. (We used that ice in the coolers. Double duty benefit, it gets our freezer defrosted and cools the food in the coolers.)
Since it was a prolonged outage and a large percentage of town was also out of power in residential areas from trees and tree limbs coming down on power lines, ice was hard to find, even though we had plenty of coolers. It doesn’t do you much good if you have all the coolers in the world and your local store is out of ice.
So what we had to do was COOK everything that we could. Cooked food lasts much longer than fresh food, especially where meats and such are concerned. So we broke out the charcoal grill and we spent all day cooking and smoking all the meats in our freezer.
As the outage continued, we took some of that meat and dried it jerky style and salted it so that it would last as long as we needed to, and consumed the last of the perishable items first. Dinner was cooked and heated on either our propane dual burner camping stove, our charcoal grill, or over an open wood fire, depending on what it was. All things considered, I hadn’t had that much fun since I was a kid!
We could have asked for help from our neighbors, and maybe even run an extension cord from their house to our freezer and/or fridge, but we thought it was an excellent time to test ourselves during a real emergency, during a fairly safe and controlled ‘outage’.
We used our stored water for washing, cooking, etc. Washed up in a bucket, and all that good stuff.
At the end of the 12 days when our power came back on, we were actually kind of disappointed. We’d gotten used to no electricity. We were playing board games and cards by candlelight every night instead of being plugged into some form of digital media or computer. It was a nice break, almost like a vacation, or an adventure.
It was also the first time in my wife’s life that she had to ‘do without’ water on hand instantly or power for a prolonged period of time, so that was a good learning experience as well. All in all, if you turn the little ‘emergencies’ into lessons and adventures, it can be fun and enlightening for the whole family, instead of a boring drag where ‘lil Timmy and Suzy are just waiting for the power to come back on so they can play their Wii and XBOX 360 again.
(Take that chance to BBQ those useless mind sucking game consoles too. You’ll have plausible deniability and can say they got fried in the power outage. Your family will thank you for it 20 years down the road when your kids are critical thinkers and not mind numbed zombies.)