My chest freezer is the least of my worries during a power outage. It would have to be a very long outage to affect a full freezer of food.

Microbiologist here. Food will be fine during a day's worth of power outage. All that will happen is that its shelf-life will be reduced, starting with refrigerated meats, left-overs and dairy.

You have to be vigilant about not opening the fridge doors too frequently (and freezer not at all if you can help it). Think about what you need for the next few hours, take out the necessary quantities, and put the rest back. No going in and out to snack.

I agree with others to have a self-check item in the freezer. My husband likes to freeze a small glass of water diagonally, and then store it upright (with its slant), so that if we lose power during a trip, we can check up on our return whether it was long enough for the food to be suspect: all we do is see if the ice surface in the glass is flat or still on a slant.

Anonymous wrote:Why don’t you have a generator and other back up systems? Everyone in my DC neighborhood does. We also have generators at our other homes.

At your other homes? GTFOH. 🤮

You need a generator. A lot of folks in my neighborhood have them.

How long are these outages?

I had a four hour outage the other day and it was fine. Freezer remained cold.

How many hours are the outages for? Is it for over 24 hours at a time? If it’s for a few hours at a time, then it should be ok, just keep the freezer closed.

Why don’t you have a generator and other back up systems? Everyone in my DC neighborhood does. We also have generators at our other homes.

You could get a small generator to just cover the freezer ...but assuming you keep it shut and it is pretty full it will be fine for a long while.

A good tip...put some ice cubes in a zip lock bag or container in your freezer. Check them after a power outage. If they are frozen your food is 100% fine.

A fully stocked freezer of food that is frozen solid stays fine for many hours without power. Especially if you don’t open it to check on the food.

We live in a NOVA neighborhood where there are frequent power outages, sometimes for no apparent reason. On multiple occasions over the past two years, we have lost an entire week's worth of groceries to power outages. I would like to be able to stock up and store food in a freezer to save money on groceries -- but how can you do that when you don't trust the stability of the grid? Anyone else have this issue and, if so, how did you deal with it?