How Long Food Stays Safe When the Power Goes Out in South Florida

The numbers, and the asterisk on them

The figures everybody quotes come from the USDA and they are worth knowing:

• Refrigerator: about four hours, with the door kept shut.
• Full freezer: about forty-eight hours.
• Half-full freezer: about twenty-four.

The asterisk is that those assume a house at normal room temperature. A South Florida house without air conditioning in August is not that. The kitchen climbs into the high eighties within a few hours, the appliance is losing heat to a warmer room than the figures assume, and every one of those windows shortens.

Treat them as optimistic and plan for less.

Before the season

Two things, and neither costs anything.

Freeze water in containers and keep them in the freezer. They fill the empty space — a full freezer holds its temperature twice as long as a half-empty one — and if the power goes out, they migrate to the refrigerator as ice packs.

Put a thermometer in each compartment now. Not for the outage; for after it. When the power comes back you will want to know whether the food went above 40°F, and by then guessing is all you have left.

There is a well-known version of this with a cup of frozen water and a coin on top: if the coin has sunk to the bottom, the freezer thawed completely while you were away and refroze. It works, and it answers a question you cannot otherwise answer about a house you were not in.

During

• Keep both doors shut. Everything else is secondary.
• Move refrigerator food into the freezer if there is room, early, in one opening.
• Ice helps. Bags of ice in the fresh food compartment; dry ice in the freezer if you can get it — roughly fifty pounds holds a full freezer for about two days. Gloves, and never in a sealed space.
• Do not run a generator indoors, in a garage, or near a window. That is not an appliance point and it is the most dangerous thing on this page.

After

Read the thermometers before you open anything else.

• Anything in the refrigerator that has been above 40°F for more than two hours goes. Meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, cooked leftovers, cut fruit, soft cheeses.
• Freezer food that still has ice crystals and is at or below 40°F can be refrozen. The texture will be worse; it will be safe.
• Food that fully thawed and sat warm goes, whatever it looks like.
• Condiments, hard cheeses, butter, jams and whole uncut produce are generally fine.

You cannot smell the difference, and neither can anybody else. The bacteria that make people ill do not announce themselves, which is why the rule is time and temperature rather than judgement.

Then look at the appliance itself

Storm season produces a run of appliances that came back oddly, and they divide into two.

Confused. A display that is blank or frozen, a control that ignores keys, a code that appeared with the outage. Five minutes genuinely off at the breaker clears a real share of these — and it is free.

Damaged. A breaker that trips when the appliance runs, a burning smell, a compartment that never comes back down to temperature. Those are not resets.

There is a third category worth naming: an appliance that survived the outage and is now working harder than it should because the condenser is packed with dust and the kitchen has been at eighty degrees for three days. That one shows up a week later as a refrigerator that will not quite hold, and it is the cheapest thing on that whole list to fix.