I’ve been without electricity for about 40 hours now. There are good stories and bad stories.
Bad: I’ve learned that my neighbor has a generator. A loud generator.
Good: My electric water heater is still full of moderately hot water! I took a hot shower this morning! I wonder how it will be tomorrow.
Bad: I’ve discovered a “feature” in my new garage door opener. It apparently REALLY wants you to know when it’s using its battery backup. It loudly beeps every 4 seconds to let you know that it’s on battery. Every 4 seconds. Day and night. The control panel helpfully displays a message saying that there’s no power. Ok, which of the four buttons on the panel dismisses that message and disables the beeping? Ha! None of them. All the buttons are nonfunctional. But the beeping continues. I finally got on a ladder and disconnected the battery.
Good: I have never seen as many stars from my house as I saw last night. No light pollution, no annoying 50,000 lumen porch light from my neighbor’s house. It was breathtaking.
So-so: internet accessibility through my cellphone has been spotty. Sometimes it’s fine, others it’s slow as molasses. I guess everyone in the area is now simultaneously using their phone for connectivity.
Good: I have a gas cooktop so I can still cook some things, although I need to light it with a match.
Bad: Traffic lights are out, so traffic has been nightmarish. I haven’t had to go out yet but I think I’m going to try to go to the grocery store today.
So-so: I filled my freezer with about 10 quart-sized containers of water before the outage started so there’s lots of ice in there. I took a quick peek in this morning and the containers still seem frozen, but I don’t know how much longer that will last. Losing the freezer contents is my main anxiety about this.
I never heard of a garage door with a battery backup? How big is the battery and how many times can it operate the garage door?
In case anyone isn’t aware, to open a standard garage door without power you will need to disengage the door from the garage door drive system. There is typically a handle on a string near the door that you pull to unlock the shuttle from the chain or whatever. Then you can lift the door up by hand. It will probably feel heavy, so lift carefully to avoid injury.
Don’t peak in there until a few hours after the power is back on. You’ll be able to tell by things like ice cream or anything that’s ‘loose’(IQF) like corn or peas how much things thawed out. Those frozen bottles of water will certainly buy you a lot of time, and you can do the same thing with the fridge*, but opening the door from time to time will really speed things up since it has no way to recover the cold air you let out.
*Either simply keeping water bottles in the fridge, or keeping them in the freezer and when the power goes out, moving them to the top shelf of the fridge.
For Wi-Fi service my car has a hotspot. I was surprised how good it worked with a ‘no’ electricity event we had a few months ago. You can buy a free standing one. It’s calked a jetpack I think.
If you’re not too particular you can heat a kettle of water and pour it in a bucket add cool water to fill it up and have a bucket shower. Not perfect but it helps.
I’m on a well so when electricity is off I don’t have water. That’s a luxury.
We have generators. They help but are so loud. I’m like you, my freezer(s) contents would be a big loss.
Take care.
Keep us posted on how its going.
As far as the freezer, I heard a great idea. Freeze a plastic bottle of water. Put a penny on top of the ice. Then leave it in the freezer. If you open your freezer and see the penny has dropped, then you know thawing happened. If it’s on the bottom then it completely thawed.
Power returned unexpectedly early. It came back on at 4:20pm exactly (really!), out for 45 hours. Disappointingly, the freezer temperature was 41 F even though almost all the ice blocks were still frozen. All the food seems to be fine though; no defrosting.
Lost power on Saturday, and was dark until Tuesday night.
I’ve got sensors that log temp and humidity from someone called SensorPush. One normally lives in my garage freezer and another is in the humidor. When I got word that I was going to lose power, I moved it to the fridge. Think it was the FDA who says food in a full but powerless freezer will be OK for 48 hours and 8 hours in a fridge. The sensors showed this is right on, and the nearly linear increase in freezer temp told me to find alternate lodging at friends’ freezers for my frozen stuff by 8AM on Monday or it would be above 32.
I ended up tossing everything from the fridge. No huge loss - a stick of butter, one egg, half gallon of milk and assorted sauces, relish, etc. Good “excuse” to get rid of the random drips and drops of old stuff.