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EvanAndersonyesterday at 5:29 PM3 repliesview on HN

As long as you're not opening the fridge / freezer during the outage (and you have sufficient thermal mass of food in it) you don't need to worry about "boosting" it during a power outage of only 4 hours. I don't recall the rule of thumb off the top of my head, but for at least 6 hours I'd expect the contents of normal fridge / freezer to be just fine (as long as there's thermal mass there).


Replies

jonathanlydallyesterday at 5:36 PM

Can confirm from years of load shedding in the past in South Africa where my area had 4 hour outages.

That duration was tough for various reasons, but fridge and freezer were not really an issue.

I was very happy when they changed to 2 hour outages (albeit twice as many), and then even happier with not having load shedding for about 2 years now.

Aachenyesterday at 6:28 PM

Yes, thanks, indeed I'd start doing this *after* 4h if I have such a battery since fridge, freezer, and laptop are all in different places and they'll run for 90 minutes to cool or charge and it's probably not bad to get around to all towards the end of the first day with no stress. It was just an arbitrary starting point really. Freezer contents are also all fine after 24h but maybe some edges got towards the thawing point. I've not tried it out and simply wouldn't care to find out

DontchaKnowityesterday at 6:24 PM

They said longer than 4 hours