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Comment by an-allen | Hacker News Reader

Hi. Actualexperience here... it depends on the ambient temperature and how much stuff is in said freezer. So heres a data point:

Freezer: normal upper level refrigerator freezer chock full of frozen fish caught on holiday in Alaska.

Place, Time: Houston, TX, Late Summer, Hurricane Igor just hit and knocked our power out for 14 days.

Findings: We kept the freezer shut and at about 4-5 days the fish was noticeably thawing and getting flexible. Still cold, but not frozen. I think we might have made an attempt at dry ice but it was too late in the process to matter.

At day 8 or so it had completely defrosted.

At day 10 the smell was so horrendous that if we opened the freezer door we would gag.

At day 14 the power returned. On day 15 or 16 we opened the now cold rotted fish in the freezer and cleaned it out. We vomited multiple times. The smell, despite multiple rounds of bleach, never really went away. The stench permanently inextricable from the lining of the freezer, and the flavor of every ice cube ever made in it from then on.

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PSA: I've worked disaster relief/reconstruction in Houston, New Orleans, and a few other places. If you come across a fridge with the doors taped shut DO NOT OPEN IT. If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT.

It's not worth it. You will never make the fridge use-able again.

If you have to leave ahead of a disaster, consider emptying your fridges/freezer and propping the doors open.

Obviously this advice is strongest in warm areas.

> If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT. It's not worth it. You will never make the fridge use-able again.

I don't quite understand what you're saying here - that after 24 hours, things will be defrosted and rotted enough that the fridge/freezer will stink forever? That it should be taped closed and the whole thing disposed of after the event? Or are you saying only if you open it, it'll never be useable again? I have experienced a number of multi-day power outages, and have never had to tape a fridge shut and not use it again, so I disagree pretty strongly with that advice.

Absolutely agree with preemptively emptying fridges/freezers and leaving doors propped open.

> "I have experienced a number of multi-day power outages, and have never had to tape a fridge shut and not use it again, so I disagree pretty strongly with that advice."

How hot was it when this happened? Were you there to manage the situation or did you have to leave?

If you have to leave in a hurry and are not able to empty your fridge, and it is hot, and you are not able to return for a few days, then yes, your fridge will probably never be usable again.

If your fridge is in a cool basement, then yea, you probably just have some food spoilage.

> If you have to leave in a hurry and are not able to empty your fridge, and it is hot, and you are not able to return for a few days, then yes, your fridge will probably never be usable again.

That's much more useful, nuanced advice than "if it's been more than 24 hours, tape it shut and throw it away".

My experiences have been in more moderate climate, probably temps in the 15-25 range. That said, it also depends what's in the fridge - I moved into an apartment where some beer had exploded in a left-behind beer fridge, the entire inside was coated in green mold for several months. Treatment with succession of soap, bleach, and oxiclean, and it's still in use to this day - so contents of the fridge matters too.

> If you come home after power was lost for more than a day or so, TAPE THE DOORS OF YOUR FRIDGE SHUT AND DO NOT OPEN IT.

I think your timing is off here. I lost power for about three days during Hurricane Charley. This was the middle of summer in Orlando, Florida so hot hot hot. As far as I remember, my roommate and I left the fridge closed and evacuated. When we returned, the contents of the fridge were spoiled, but I don't remember anything particularly horrendous about it.

Every case is different, I've heard enough horror stories for me to be at least very careful about it.

If you refreeze rotten food, doesn't that reduce the smell released, like less odor is wafting around in the air from frozen meat than warmed up meat?

Like we are able to find preserved remains in ice of people who perished in these harsh climates, as opposed to a warmer climate where all the tissue would be putrid immediately.

Having gotten paid for fixing many a fridge and reclaiming a ton in college, the answer was, toss on a respirator, then pour a bottle of bleach in to the fridge (dorm size) and let it sit for a week in the heat. Then open it and hose it out. It was fine. Full size fridge is like 3 bottles of bleach. Also you have to put it on it's back (coils).

Soooo many students were like "This fridge is a loss" and would just give them to me.

Houstonian here — did you mean Hurricane Ike (Sept. 2008)?

Hurricane Igor (Sept. 2010) hit Canada, not Houston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Igor

(In Hurricane Ike, we lost power for seven days, and ice and dry ice at the local grocery stores were rationed. We have a gas range and a gas grill in the backyard hooked to the natural-gas line. Every night for the first few nights, quite a few neighbors came over to grill and share stuff from their freezers; we cooked side dishes on the gas range in the kitchen. Everyone sat around and ate and talked on the patio by candlelight. It actually was kind of a nice time, especially since the weather was unseasonably pleasant for that time of year.)

That does sound nice. Unfortunate that COVID is really going to make it harder for people to pool resources like that to handle an emergency situation.

I’m laughing a bit thinking of the absurdity going on in my brain. While reading the parent comment there were two parallel streams going on in my brain:

“That is so awesome that the community rallied together like that”

“What the duck are they doing having a large gathering in their yard?! Surely they could have figured out a safer way to do that! If someone got COVID during a hurricane with no power that could be really bad!”

> If someone got COVID during a hurricane with no power that could be really bad!”

The 2020 hurricane season will be starting soon. With COVID, the emergency financial legislation running out, the election, schools, holidays, and hurricane season, I fear this fall will be something we'll remember for decades to come.

GP commenter here — I assume you re-read my comment and realized that this was in September 2008 .... :-)

Hahahaha yes. That's when I realized that it was totally reasonable and that my brain's mental model of the world has been thoroughly rewired...

With proper precautions in an outdoor format, risk seems manageable. There's nothing about grilling that really requires close physical proximity.

Agreed, just makes it harder, and removes some of that feel good connection that comes from rallying in the face of catastrophe. Which imo is one of the best parts of being human.

Well if anything (trying to look on the bright side here), travel beyond your own community would be limited so less risk of spreading or bringing the disease over.

Yep! Wow can’t believe I forgot that name. It was totally Ike. It seems like lifetimes ago!

Not to argue with science but why didn't you clean the fish out about day 7? Was it hurricane made getting rid of fish problematic?

I think shock, depression, anger, disbelief, the mechanics of where to put the rotting fish... like there was a tree down in our front yard, every store was closed in a 40 mile radius, power was out to most of Houston... but yea hindsight being 20/20 i would have relocated the fish to a house with a generator. it was a really dark time man.

I'm familiar with the first 4 factors and how they can make the obvious difficult to do. Well at least you made it through, even if you lost the refrigerator.

I had a similar loss of fridge when we went on vacation one time and the power went off some time while we were gone and I had not emptied the freezer all the way as it seemed idiotic to garbage all that perfectly good food when we were only gone for 2 weeks.

If you had a shovel would it not have been the more hygienic disposal option, at about day 7/8 once you were sure the power was not coming back soon, to dig a 3.5 foot deep hole, put the fish in it and cover it over?

I think he described why he didn't get rid of the fish, some times the world is structured in such a way that you really can't handle the obvious things.

Also, whole burying fish may be logically obvious in this case, it is almost never the correct move in any other situation. Actions that defy common sense can be really difficult to commit, particularly in times when the stakes seem high. What if they buried it, the world was ending, and they somehow needed all that food? It's an easier call to make here than it was there.

Can you imagine that conversation with your neighbors?

"Tom, why are you burying fish in your yard? Don't you have better things to be doing like evacuating or collecting fire wood right now?"

"Nah, if I don't do this, my fridge might smell terrible in a week."

There's really not much you can do. If you take it out and throw it away, the stench will just waft back into the house because the windows are open because there's no A/C. You'll also get curious critters at night and if they knock it over and drag it across the yard, well, now you have bigger problems.

Trash doesn't run because trees and lines are down, btw.

If the power infrastructure hasn't been restored yet, what are the odds of trash being collected?

The freezer at least contains the smell a bit. That fish outdoors in the heat could start smelling even worse.

If you have even the smallest patch of ground, dig a small hole, drop the dead animals/spoiled meat in there, and the smell is gone within minutes.

My experience comes from living countryside with two cats dragging in rabbits, rats, pheasants and two/three daily mice and birds in. My cats prefer cat-food, so they drag in the dead animals, tuck it under the couch or behind the fridge, and then eat their favorite chunks, the assholes.

Throwing it on the compost heap smells way worse and attracts flies. than digging a ~3cm deep hole and covering it. A mouse under the ground, is gone in less than a week (I guess its eaten by worms and insects mostly). My garden is doing very well.

Exactly. Ground biome is really good at recycling, especially once living matter.

'Teach a man to eat fish and he will be cold for one day...' no, wait...

But seriously, why not eat BBQ fish every day?

Opening the freezer would have substantially decreased the frozen time, with each opening. Specifically as OP seemed to specify an upright freezer.

Chest freezer would have had less of an impact, but still noticeable.

I guess having a good stock of malt vinegar and plenty of jars around would be helpful so you can make a lot of pickled fish.

You want to be very careful about pickling food of unknown freshness - if the meat had turned pickling will do nothing except provide a wonderful breeding ground for a lot of really fun bacteria.

There is a good trick to use if you leave on vacation (or for monitoring breast milk for those new parents). You can freeze a cup of water, and throw a coin on top. If your freezer melts at any point, the coin will be at the bottom, not the top of the water glass when it refreezes.

Ice floats. Even if the most of the ice in the cup has melted, but there was a little bit of it left, the coin will stay on top.

From my personal experience: while we were away on vacation, there was a power outrage for 24_ hours. Coin was on top, but all ice cream and frozen packaged food was ruined. Not sure about big chunks of beef.

A similar tip is to leave an ice cube of of a tray, or in a bag. If the cube is out of shape when you return, it thawed.

I left the comment partially to see if anyone countered it.

I wonder if the better solution would be to tip it on a 45 degree angle. If it melts, it will now be flat with gravity. No coin required

a variant is to put an ice cube out of its container and tilted on the rack inside the fridge. If it thaws, it will fail through the rack and not be where you left it when you check for it.

Oh god, I remember this as well. We had a small chest freezer in the basement. It had this one "feature" that if the power went out it would not startup again until you flicked the power switch. For extended power outages lasting days this makes some sense but for a limited outage of a few hours this was bat shit crazy. Similar experience from the article, rotting meat, had to carry the freezer up the garage to clean it. Water + soap, bleach, lemon juice and many other combinations. Nothing would get rid of the smell even cleaning the rubber gaskets and seals. I even tried spraying the entire inner surfaces with Fabreeze odor killer and leaving it closed for a few days.

You missed the perhaps most important datapoint: how often and many times did you open the freezer? Side loaded freezer and fridges are extremely inefficient because all the cold air is let out when you open the door.

This is also why it's important to FILL the freezer as much as possible if you know you might lose power.

We lost power for 4 days, but I packed in every water bottle I could find before hand, and everything remained frozen for the entire period. Literally almost no space left for air.

We also did not open it, of course.

Plastic bags of water are even better because they leave no spaces between them.

Careful with that, it can be a massive headache when you want to try and get them back out again if you make the mistake of letting them freeze around something to where it's now stuck in place.

I too have had a freezer full of bags of delicious homemade chicken stock, each intertwined with and near-permanently bonded to the wire shelving.

Yea so a few things he pointed out in this write up were readily observable. For example, the air falling out of the freezer is actually quite visible when hitting a hot humid ambient air. Also you could see the rate of defrosting accelerate everytime you opened the door.

By the time we were able to find a gas station with dry ice we were out looking for open wal marts at a 73 mile radius from the house (Columbus Texas). The dry ice was not significant enough to do much more than get the fish cool. It was too late.

Interesting point I'd never considered until this thread...

Why not tip the freezer / fridge onto its back? So that doors open "up"?

Aware they're typically not perfectly flat on the rear face, but close enough you could support it with minimal work. And if it's unpowered, there's no need for clearance back there.

On the one hand that would assist with the immediate problem but might cause another problem down the line. Most small refrigerated appliances use hermetically sealed compressors and you’re actually supposed to wait a bit 24hrs ish before starting them to allow the oil in the system to drain back to where it belongs. So theoretically after the power came back on and you flip it back upright you should wait to turn it back on. In reality, lots of people move freezers and fridges and window a/c units and plug them back in and use them right away with no problem. But it is possible that you might severely shorten the life of your equipment too.

> Side loaded freezer and fridges are extremely inefficient because all the cold air is let out when you open the door.

Unless they have drawers https://pc.vertaa.fi/250x250/102776708.jpg

But the heat capacity of the air inside is negligible compared to that of the solid stuff inside. So it shouldn’t matter if you do it just a few times in two weeks.

I always imagined that the air and its thermal mass was insignificant compared to the ice cubes and frozen steaks and frozen pizzas. The mass of the air must be less than 1% of all those things, no?

Ice cubes always taste funny if used without good ice forms, absorbing the fridge odors. Use the ones with silicone cover. Not a hint of the freezer in the made ice.

I got these mostly because space is a luxury in our freezer (very tiny) and wanted to vertically stack them. I love them. It's such a weird thing to throw praise on, but I've literally told friends to get the silicon cover ice trays and never look back.

The cover is silicon, but the tray is regular plastic?

Yes, Bed Bath & Beyond has had these for years.

Ooo nice, never seen this before.

Why not cook everything at that point and throw a feast. We've done this in India with an extended power cut.

If their stove and oven are electric, and they don't have, or don't have fuel for, a propane or charcoal grill, then a hurricane could really knock out their ability to cook things.

Then again, hurricanes provide a lot of readily available wood debris.

Freshly downed live trees aren't great for firewood. The moisture content tends to make the wood difficult to light (if you can't spare lighter fluid, diesel, gasoline, candles, etc.) and it tends to produce a lot of smoke once lit. I've done enough camping that I can get wet wood burning if I have enough dry twigs, dry pine needles, birch bark, etc., but if your only experience with starting fires is pouring lighter fluid on split wood that has been dried 2+ years, you're going to have a bad time trying to get wet wood burning using only things you find in a forest after a storm.

And anything used in construction has been heavily treated to resist water damage, so I wouldn't want to be near those fumes, let alone eat something cooked from them.

Regular construction SPF isn't treated, and doesn't resist anything; that costs extra.

I would say definitely better safe than sorry, especially if you're not sure how to identify pressure treated wood.

It may be OK after the smoke clears. Rookies who have never used a real charcoal BBQ don't know when the coals are ready and start cooking too soon. You cook when it seems like it's too late the coals are ash but that's the time to do it.

He's talking about treated wood which is the exception. I wouldn't cook off of burning plywood or OSB but the smoke shouldn't be that toxic. Often the bottom plate of a wall will be pressure treated wood which is filled with all sorts of nasty preservatives and stuff from before 2004 was almost all treated with chromated copper arsenate. That's got a hexavalent Chromium compound (carcinogenic) along with Arsenic pentoxide (highly toxic) plus a dash of Copper because apparently the Arsenic and hexavalent Chromium weren't bad enough.

I would not cook on burning pressure treated lumber, but the vast majority of lumber in construction is not pressure treated.

So when the coals are pure white, that's when to start cooking?

White & glowing. You're trying to drive off all the black bits.

Well, you're not driving off the "black bits". There's still plenty of "black bits" (unburned carbon and high-carbon compounds) in the interior. It's just that 1. you really really want to wait until the lighter fluid is burned off and 2. the whole surface hasn't started burning until the whole surface has started generating white ash. In the case of charcoal with igniter integrated in the outer layer ("match light" charcoal), I would guess you want to burn off that outer igniter layer.

As a young boy scout of 12 or so, I ate some pork that my patrol and I had cooked over charcoal before all of the lighter fluid had burned off. It tasted like lighter fluid smells. We never made that mistake again.

Pro tip from 12 year-old me: styrofoam cooler lids make great fans to speed the progression of the reaction.

Pro tip 2 from 12 year-old me: don't get the lid too close to the charcoal, or it will melt. Also, wet wool finger mittens can cook and become brittle far from a wet wood fire, because the fire gets very hot when you blow on it to keep it from going out and very cool when you go to check the temperature near your mittens.

What if I am using regular charcoal without any lighter fluid because I have a chimney? Still wait for complete white on the Exterior right?

My point is, you don't suddenly lose the ability to cook things when you don't have electricity, propane, or charcoal.

Nothing you'd want to burn.

Best advice is during hurricane season keep freezer and refrigerator stock to a minimum to keep your losses low. Stock up on non-perishables, but not overstock.

If you absolutely must have cold stuff while the power is out, either get a generator or look into 12V gear.

This is why you will see freezers lining the street for trash collection after a major power outage during a hurricane. Freezers are not super-expensive, and you can usually get them covered by insurance or disaster relief, so it's easier to just duct tape the entire fish coffin and be done with it.

when the covid pandemic first hit and lockdown was looming it was impossible to find freezers, locally and online, even up to the $1K price point.

I'm not talking about pandemic related issues. I'm talking about power disrupting disaster issues.

There's two reasons why most people on the Gulf Coast and lower Eastern seaboard keep their freezers completely stocked: so they have food to eat in the case of an emergency, and because a full freezer stays frozen longer.

" it depends on the ambient temperature and how much stuff is in said freezer."

It also depends very much on the isolation of the freezer.

And to what temperature it was set.

And of course, how often you open it.

And the outside (of the freezer) air temp.

Bicarbonate of soda on a damp cloth works well to remove scents.

Good data point !

Maybe next time try it with a top loaded freezer instead and see what happens.

Sorry about the freezer, but it was in the interest of science.

> At day 8 or so it had completely defrosted.

It's unclear why you didn't throw it away at this point.

Was it an experiment?

USDA says to throw away everything after 4 hours.

Good ol government!

The overly cautious approach is how anyone that does not want a lawsuit handles these sorts of things. Do I really need to chuck out that bottle of ibuprofen after 4 to 5 years?

Why are you answering the question? The OP isn't asking people, it's the title of the article, which mentions everything you've said in your comment.

The actual article doesn't answer the question and this is actually a much more helpful answer.

It actually does, but not as clearly as I'd hoped.

"for a freezer of this size, completely packed, you would probably have twice as long before running into problems with melting when the power goes out, so about 36 hours. This assuming it's in a room at 19° C (a cool basement). If it were in a hot garage at 30° C, the food would thaw in about 3/4 of the time.

And while the power is out, for each time the door is opened for five seconds, subtract 7 minutes. "

I watched and enjoyed the original video when it came out, so I knew to look for this information in the text, making it easier to find.

He walks back the 36 hours claim which he recognizes is a completely unjustified extrapolation. And the 'subtract 7 minutes' is a very dubious answer to a completely different question.

Based on my experience last week, I think the 36 hours conservative ballpark. My upright freezer (pretty full) was still OK at 48 hours but I don't think it would have completely made it through another 24. A smaller top freezer compartment had enough thawing that I had to throw some things, but not everything, out.

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