GREENSBORO, N.C. — If the power goes out, you're worried about what's in your kitchen and all the groceries you have. If you're home, you'll know if your power goes out and for how long. If you're at work or evacuated, you have to guess how long has it been and if your food is safe to eat.
2 Wants To Know has a trick, get a mug, fill it with water, and put it in your freezer. Once it's frozen, put a coin on top of the frozen water. If the coin stays on the top after an outage, your food never defrosted and refroze and is safe to eat.
Now if the coin you put on top drops to the bottom of the cup, it means everything in the freezer thawed out and refroze and that means the food is no longer good.
Here are a few timelines to remember:
Fridge food stays good for four hours if the door remains closed. Past the four hours and you'll want to pack perishables in ice to keep them at a safe temperature.
Frozen food is good for up to 48 hours if the doors have been kept closed and the freezer is full. The time drops to 24 hours if the freezer is half full.
If a power outage were to last long enough for you to have to throw out a bunch of food, is it worth it to make a claim with your insurance company?
"If you had a catastrophe and a tree fell on your house and you're replacing your roof, you lost power and oh, by the way everything in the fridge is spoiled, yes I would add that to the claim. But if your power went out and you lost $250 in food, that sucks and that's a lot of money, but I wouldn't report a claim over that," said Christopher Cook, Alliance Insurance Services.