\o/

Hooray for connected! Oh, and that other stuff too

Oh wonderful. So glad you are safe!!!

Terrific! Glad to hear it.

yay. we heard Manhattan was offline. We are still w/o power at home. went into the Princeton office today - power there

of course you did

wasn't too bad, Honour. yesterday the roads were impassable. but i have no power/internet at home. need to communicate to outside world we're alive

true

a LOT of family members coming in to office today also to charge up electronics. grin and emptying their refrigerators into the ones here, and cooking in the microwaves

Do you have no power at all, or just a bit of gen power avail at home just to keep the bare necessities up?

the town is w/o power. we have our generator. we had to go get motor oil this morning. we're using the generator to keep the refrigerators cold

how long DOES a frig hold temp if it's not opened?

USDA Safety facts www.foodsafetynews.com/2...

So, if the fridge has a decent amount of stuff in it, a good 4 hours w/o opening it, keeps everything perfectly safe (milk, eggs, etc). Other stuff will last longer.

Once you're past 4 hours, depending on how much thermal inertia is in the foodstuffs, it gets iffy based on the specific foods. Anything you think might go off, chuck, IMO. $100 of food is cheap if

keeps someone from having a bad few days of food sickness immediately after a hurricane!

If you had lowered temp in advance & put ice or freezer packs in the fridge side, that helps extend it out a lot. Makes the fridge a giant cooler

We keep the deep freeze 'filled' (any extra space) with 1/2 gallon jugs since they stack well, and if we think we'll loose power we grab a handful and throw them in the top of the fridge and freezer early.

Deep freezers will hold temp for a long time, if you keep them shut and they have any usual amount of product in them, but the bottles help there too.

bummer. it was out for about 8 hours overnight

but of course, no one was opening it

the freezer is pretty full

How cool the house is, how much stuff is in it, etc all comes into play. Remember, USDA assumes this is happening in new Orleans in August, not New York on October/November

temperature shifts from area to area fairly proportionally to the size of differential; closer the temps are (60F house, 40F fridge) less energy movement than 90F house, 40F fridge.

yeah, my brother in law the dr says we are probably okay. they

have been w/o power since monday night and parts of their freezer are still frozen, and they've been opening it

Frozen food's easy; so long as it still has ice crystals, it's fine.

nods i was concerned about the food in the frig. but i had that packed full also.

fuller the better, with cold foods, as they all absorb the heat energy slowly and fairly equally, so the more stuff was cold, the less each will increase per watt absorbed by the fridge

when the ice storm happened in 1998 we were not even able to leave home for 4 days or so (driveway on hill, sheer ice that we couldn't even walk on) - we were without power for 9 days. I had frozen 2-l bottles

filling our chest freezer (24 cu ft) in the basement - we were actually able to open it and get food (and ice!) out & close it again; nothing thawed

the bottles kept things frozen and provided drinking, cooking, & teeth-brushing water. We had a wood stove to heat and cook on & used water from a stream on the property that we could reach, to flush with.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No...

goo.gl/jkeaJ

Yeah but you live in Canada where the very air freezes like the back side of the moon

Thus was invented Hockey as a sport...

lol - maybe, but during those 9 days, it was mostly above freezing - which is why there was an ice storm - snow wouldn't have done that; it was water that froze overnight, then got covered with more water, etc

point was, the bottles in the freezer really worked!