Yep, mother nature gave Chicagoland the finger yesterday. Not one, but two separate big thunderstorms. For me the power went out about 3 PM Friday and wasn’t back on until 2 PM today, Saturday.
I kept my fridge and freezer closed the entire outage with the hope that the food could be salvaged (I really expected the power back on yesterday evening, then yesterday night, then early Saturday, then morning Saturday, then noon Saturday.)
But alas, I finally got the power back, let the fridge/freezer run about an hour, then cautiously opened the door.
Well, it stinks. Both fridge and freezer, that is.
Oh well. Not the worst thing ever. I needed an excuse to clean them out and scrub them down anyways.
I’m sure my perspective Is way off because I’m a caterer and am used to dealing with large quantities, but $50 doesn’t sound like a whole bunch of food to me. At that point, even in my personal refrigerator I think it would be pretty bare.
I’m sorry for your loss, though. One of my 49 cu ft fridges tripped the breaker one night and it was a huge mess.
No, you’re right. It’s not a lot. It doesn’t “hurt” me at all. I shouldn’t complain.
Just a minor annoyance.
Oh well, the power outage did prompt me to buy a bunch of candles. I spent all last night reading my Kindle by candlelight, which was kind of fun. Plus it got me to plow through a bunch of my reading backlog, since I had nothing else to do.
You might want to wash the fridge and freezer with some hot soapy water to get the smell out. Most fridges are not too bad to clean. A box of baking soda will help too, I keep a box in the fridge and one in the freezer and change them every few months. To bad you have to toss out your food but you don’t want to get sick.
The power out here has been a lot more reliable in recent years but multi-hour or multi-day power outages are not totally lost in the past.
My grandparents have lost multiple fridge and freezer loads so last year we got smart and spent $250 for a generator that is powerful enough to run the fridge and freezer. As a bonus we can plug in a kettle or microwave in place of the fridge for a few minutes to ensure we have hot food, and we can add a CFL lamp at night with no problems.
A full fridge and freezer not going to waste over the past two outages have paid for the generator. Of course running the beast isn’t quiet and when you live in the sticks and every other house on the street has a generator running you won’t get noise complaints like you would in the city.
The only consolation for the last one I experienced was that because it was Christmas Eve, it was fucking cold and I didn’t lose any food even though I didn’t have power for about 15 hours.
Suburbs of Chicago here - my power was out from 4:15 Friday through 7 pm Saturday. I managed to save a $90 beef tenderloin (trimmed and cut) that my husband had just splurged on a couple days prior, by going out to buy a metric buttload of ice and loading up some small coolers with it, plus wrapping up a block and packing it into the fridge. I think the vegetables in the crisper are OK, but anything dairy is getting chucked. I thought the freezer would be all right with the ice I packed in, but looks like that’s probably a loss - nothing that important or pricey in there at least.
We lost power for about 28 hours, a couple of years back, and everything in the fridge with the exception of unopened stuff, or condiments which are OK at room temp (e.g. ketchup) had to get tossed. On the plus side, it was a great opportunity to scrub the interior of the thing.
Our large freezer (a standalone upright in the basement) was fine for that short of an outage, since it was full, and was never opened.
We have a freezer in the basement and very few outlets down there.
My son needed a lamp in the “fort” he and his friends built.
Fortunately, the half a cow my husband had ordered hadn’t been delivered yet. But there were some things in there (grass fed steaks, salmon, eight boxes of girl scout cookies) that I cried over.
The last time I had a big power outage, my brother and I spent about an hour eating ice cream, yogurt, cream cheese and tomato sandwiches… we pigged out on the food we know would spoil… We played board games by candle light and pigged out.
We had that happen, too. Out of town for the weekend, come home to hear generators pounding away up and down the street, cautiously opening the freezer to go “EEEW!”
Got a nice 5000 watt generator soon after. It’s saved us several times since, especially one June weekend when we had a house full of company and family, and a graduation open house, but no cooperation from the electric company.
You can probably wash the shelves in the dishwasher. I clean my fridge every year at Passover, and that’s how I clean the shelves. It’s way easier than cleaning them by hand.
We haven’t had an outage that was long enough to defrost anything in the fridge or freezer, even in the Great Ice Storm, but we keep a half dozen big plastic bottles filled with water and stuck in the bottom of the freezer to freeze as an emergency ice supply. Recycled laundry bleach jugs or similar work well for this.
Reminds me of a similar story.
Ages ago, there was a blackout in NYC when I was living there.
A friend had a freezer in his apartment and quickly called everyone he knew and decided to have a party that night.
That was the good news.
Bad news was he lived on 25th floor.
Walked all the way up (no air conditioning, needless to say, on that hot and humid day) and when I finally got up there, he was able to cook food on his gas stove.
Unfortunately, the toilet was using water pumped up by an electric pump, so it was not a pleasant event if you had to use it.
To top off the party, we had just started cooking and - voila - the electricity came back on.
Due to the stench of the toilet and the humidity and heat, the party ended rather abruptly and people dashed to take the elevator down the 25 flight.
A few years ago I was on the eve of taking my annual summer vacation. I decided to celebrate by cooking up some crab legs. But the supermarket seemed to be having some problems and somehow the fish didn’t seem so fresh. I decided to go out for a couple of slices instead, and kept the crab in the fridge. I figured I could throw it out when I got back from vacation.
The power went out for a couple of days while we were away.
I was reminded of that crab for the next 3 months.
If stuff dripped on the box, one might worry about the integrity of the package and whether the contents had happened to get a bit soggy. This is what happened to our last box of Cafe cookies (which had been discontinued a few months previously). Sniff.
We lost a lot of food after Katrina. We spent three days without power: the dry ice lasted for enough time to cook a heck of a lot of meat on the grill. It is a really good time to give the fridge and freezer a good scrubbing, though.