The heat pump shut off with a click at 10:40 on Tuesday night. The refrigerator went quiet right after it, and the whole duplex got so still I could hear ice ticking against the bedroom window.
We'd watched it coming all afternoon. By the time I left the pharmacy at six, the cars in the lot had a clear shell on them, and every power line on the drive home was hanging lower than it should. Tyler said, "We'll lose it tonight," the same way he says it's going to rain. He was right. The power was out from 10:40 Tuesday night until 7:40 Wednesday morning. Nine hours.
How the night went
Our side of the duplex is all-electric. No power means no heat, no stove, no lights and no fridge. There's no fireplace and no gas backup. When the heat pump stopped, the thermostat read 68. By 2 a.m. it was 59 inside. By 7 a.m. it was 52, and it was about 20 degrees outside.
First we found the flashlights. One worked. The other had batteries that had quietly given up sometime last year. Then we checked our phones: mine was at 31% and Tyler's was at 18%. Then Tyler walked next door to check on Gloria. She was in her recliner under two quilts with her cat on her lap and a battery radio going, and she told him she'd seen worse and to go to bed.
My dad called around eleven. He drives a propane delivery truck, so he was going to be out in it all night, and he wanted to make one thing clear: no grill inside, no idling the car in the carport, nothing that burns anywhere near the house. He has seen what carbon monoxide does. We didn't argue.
So we went to bed in sweatshirts and wool socks under every blanket we owned. The water heater tank was still warm, so Tyler filled two water bottles from the hot tap and we tucked them at our feet. Moose got the spot between us under three blankets and didn't move until morning. He was the only one who slept well.
The freezer mistake
Here's my slip-up. The top freezer was packed with the meals I'd made back in September for my long shifts, plus some ground beef and chicken. I opened it twice during the night to "check on it," which let the cold out both times. When the power came back, the top shelf was soft and the chicken had thawed all the way through.
We didn't own a freezer thermometer, so I had no idea how warm anything had gotten. The food safety advice I found came down to one line: when in doubt, throw it out. So we threw out two pans of lasagna, a big batch of chili, three pounds of ground beef, a family pack of chicken and a few smaller things. About $140 of food went in the trash.
The worst part is that it was 20 degrees outside. We could have put everything in coolers on the back step and kept it frozen all night long. Our backyard was a better freezer than our freezer. As for whether our renters insurance had anything to say about the food, that's going to be its own post.
What we bought after
Thursday after work I went to Walmart with a short list and a hard limit of $60. Here's what came home:
- A 20,000 mAh power bank, $30. It charges both phones several times over and now lives fully charged in the kitchen drawer.
- Two fleece blankets at $8 each, $16. Extra layers for us, so Moose's three blankets can go back to being ours.
- A freezer thermometer, $4. Next time I'll know instead of guessing.
- A big pack of batteries for both flashlights, $9.
That's $59 total, which is less than half of what we lost in food. If we'd owned those four things on Tuesday night, I think we'd have kept every bit of it.
We didn't buy a generator. Even a small one costs several hundred dollars, we rent, and our carport sits right up against the house. After my dad's phone call, I'm not running anything with an engine within sniffing distance of our bedroom window. We also skipped any heater that burns fuel. Nine cold hours were miserable, but they were survivable with blankets, hot water bottles and a big warm dog.
Next time the forecast says ice, here's our plan: charge everything the afternoon before, fill the coolers, move the freezer food outside if it's cold enough, and keep the freezer door shut. And check on Gloria first thing, even though she'll tell us to go to bed again.
