After an Outage: How Long the Food in a Built-In Actually Lasts

A South Florida page rather than a general one

This city loses power in a way that much of the country does not, and it loses it in August rather than in February. A kitchen with a pair of integrated columns, a wine cabinet, a beverage center and an ice maker has a great deal of food and a great deal of glass in it, and the decisions after an outage are worth having settled in advance rather than made at nine in the evening with a torch.

The figures

A refrigerator: about four hours with the door closed.

A full freezer: about forty-eight hours. A half-full freezer: about twenty-four.

The gap between those last two is the most useful thing on this page. A freezer full of frozen food is a large block of cold that thaws slowly; a freezer with air in it is not. If your house loses power regularly and your freezer runs half empty, filling the space with bottles of water is free, works, and is worth doing before the season.

The rule that does the deciding

Above forty degrees for more than two hours: it goes.

That is a temperature rule, not a smell rule, and it is worth being blunt about why. The organisms that make people ill in a warm refrigerator do not smell, do not change appearance and do not announce themselves. Food that looks and smells completely normal after six hours at fifty degrees is not safe, and food that has thawed and been refrozen looks worse than it is.

So the useful instrument is a thermometer, and the useful habit is having one in the cabinet already. Every page on this site asks for one; this is the page where it earns its keep in one evening.

Frozen food is judged differently: if it still has ice crystals and reads at forty or below, it can be refrozen. The texture will suffer and the safety will not.

Every opening costs

The four-hour and forty-eight-hour figures assume the door stays shut. They are not a budget you can spend a little at a time.

A refrigerator door opened for thirty seconds in a warm kitchen exchanges a surprising amount of its air, and in a house where the air conditioning has also stopped, the room is not the room you think it is. During an outage the discipline is: decide what you want, open once, take it, shut it.

If the outage looks long, bagged ice in the refrigerator and bagged or dry ice in the freezer buys real hours, and the time to get it is early rather than when everybody else has the same idea.

What the appliance says when it comes back

PF. The power was interrupted. It is a record rather than a problem, and clearing it is the whole of it. After a summer storm this is the most common thing on any display in this city.

FF on refrigeration. The freezer temperature is rising too high, and the manufacturer's own first instruction with this code is to check the frozen food for thawing. It is the one refrigeration code that is about the contents rather than about a component, and after an outage it is the appliance telling you exactly what you already suspect.

If FF is still showing hours after power has returned and the cabinet has had time to pull back down, that is no longer about the outage and it is worth a call.

Two things about built-in cabinets specifically

They do not come back instantly. A compressor has a built-in delay to protect itself from short cycling, so a refrigerator that is silent for several minutes after power returns is behaving correctly rather than failing.

A cabinet that has worked hard to recover will show it. Running continuously for a day afterwards is normal. Running continuously for a week afterwards is not, and it usually means the outage found something that was already marginal — most often a condenser that could no longer shed heat, which is the cheapest thing on this site to correct and the one nothing ever reports.

That is the honest reason this page sits alongside the maintenance ones. An outage does not usually break an appliance. It does find the ones that were about to be found anyway.

Before the season, not during the storm

Three things done in advance make an outage a nuisance rather than a loss, and all of them are free or nearly so.

Fill the freezer. Air thaws fast and frozen mass does not. Bottles of water in the empty space double the time a half-full freezer holds, they cost nothing, and they are useful in their own right afterwards.

Put a thermometer in each cabinet now. Every decision on this page is a temperature decision, and the households that lose the least are the ones who can read a number rather than guess. A cheap dial thermometer in each compartment is the best five dollars in this article.

Know which breaker is which. Labelled, before you need it in the dark. It matters for restoring appliances in a sensible order and it matters far more for the far worse scenario, which is water where it should not be.

The order to restore things in

When power comes back, everything in the house tries to start at once, and refrigeration is the part that has been waiting hardest.

Compressors have a built-in delay to protect themselves from short cycling, so a cabinet that is silent for several minutes is behaving correctly. Leave doors shut for the first hour and let each cabinet pull down before anybody starts reorganizing shelves — every opening in that hour costs more than it does normally, because the cabinet has nothing in reserve.

Ice makers restart on their own schedule and the first harvest can be some hours away. Throw away whatever was in the bin: it has partly melted and refrozen, and it will have taken the smell of the freezer with it.

What an outage finds

An outage does not usually break an appliance. It finds the ones that were already marginal.

A cabinet whose condenser could no longer shed heat coped fine when it was topped up every few minutes and cannot recover from a deep warm-up. A door seal that was letting a little air in all along is a much bigger problem when the cabinet is trying to pull down twenty degrees. A compressor that was working harder than it should have been for two years is asked, in one afternoon, to do the hardest work of its life.

So if a cabinet comes back and runs continuously for a week, that is not the outage's doing in any useful sense — it is the outage having found something. The cheapest possible outcome is a condenser that needs cleaning, and in this city that is also the most likely one.

The generator question

Plenty of houses here have one, and the useful thing to know is what it is worth pointing at.

Refrigeration first, always, and by a distance. It is the only thing in the kitchen where a few hours changes an outcome rather than a convenience. A wine cabinet full of bottles is the second, particularly in August, because heat does more to wine than a short outage does to a freezer.

Cooking appliances are not worth a generator circuit. An induction top will not run on most domestic generators anyway, and a gas range will light with a match when its igniters have no power — which is worth knowing before you need dinner.