Check Your Temperatures
The key to making sure your food is safe to eat and won't need to be thrown away is to keep your food at the right temperature. If your refrigerator stops working completely, monitoring its temperature will help you work out whether or not your food is still safe.
You should make sure that you have a thermometer lying around somewhere, so if anything is wrong with your fridge or freezer, you can quickly check whether it's operating as it should.
Refrigerators should be between three and five degrees Celsius, while freezers should be in the region of negative 18 degrees. When your fridge or freezer temperatures begin to stray out of this range, you need to find another place to store your food as quickly as possible.
Keep the Doors Closed
Fridges and freezers are well insulated, so they should maintain a constant temperature fairly well even if they’re not connected to a power source. Food in your fridge should remain safe for about four hours, and the food in your freezer will stay nice and cold for up to 48 hours.
However, this time constraint can vary quite a bit if the doors of your refrigerator aren't kept shut. Although you might need to open the doors periodically to check the temperature of your food, you shouldn't keep the fridge open for any longer than strictly necessary.
Use Some Ice
When the fridge or freezer has stopped working for a while and you're approaching the time limit, you can bring the temperature back down by adding some ice. Buy as much ice as you can to fill the freezer or refrigerator space with it. Make sure you pack the ice around the food, which will protect your food against higher temperatures.
If you're someone who regularly has some extra room in the fridge or freezer, then you can prepare in advance for power outages or appliance failure by freezing some containers of water. When the fridge stops working, move some of these large ice blocks into the fridge to keep it cool.
If the freezer has stopped working, simply leaving the ice blocks where they are will help stabilise the internal temperature of your freezer for a longer period.
Have a Backup Plan
If you have to wait more than a day to get your fridge repaired, you are going to have to figure out where to keep all of your food. In this cases, you should have a backup plan in place to keep your food cool.
A few coolers with ice blocks is a good temporary fridge. The coolers and ice won't keep food frozen completely, but a cooler can dramatically slow down the thawing process, which can give you enough time to put them back into your fully-working freezer. Remember to check the temperature of your cooler just as you would with a fridge or freezer, and act accordingly if the thermometer is starting to read too high.
When your fridge or freezer stops working, don't waste any time and risk your food. Get in touch
with the professionals at Paul Matters Electrical so we can come and take a look and get it up and running again.
