Introduction
No one expects a refrigerator to break down suddenly. It induces a lot of panic, especially if you’ve recently stocked your fridge. In this situation, you can hire a certified technician to fix your problem by searching for “refrigerator repair near me”. Till the technician arrives you need to take the following steps to keep your food cold:
The Details
- Use a crap ton of ice – When your refrigerator breaks down the simplest way to keep your food cold is to go back to the century-old method. Use lots of ice. Go to a local convenience store and buy a few large bags of ice. Refrigerators have incredible insulation and when they aren’t powered, they act like giant coolers. Similar to how you fill up your cooler to keep your drinks cold, you need to fill up your refrigerator with ice to keep your food cold.
You can directly shove in a large bag of ice inside the refrigerator. However, unlike a cooler, the doors are at the front and that means water from the molten ice can leak out. That’s why it’s best to get a lot of containers and fill them up with ice instead of shoving the bag of ice directly.
After you fill up your refrigerator with ice, make sure that the door stays shut as long as possible. The air inside the refrigerator would be cooled by the ice and the door needs to be shut for as long as possible to trap the cool air. You can go even further and turn on the cooling of your home to the maximum level. This way the ambient temperature around the refrigerator would be lower and the exchange of heat would be reduced even more.
- Dry Ice – What’s better than ice? Dry ice. Dry ice is much colder than regular ice. Unlike ice that is a few degrees below zero, dry ice has a temperature of -109 degrees. Moreover, you don’t have to deal with any watery mess with dry ice. It directly sublimates into the vapor form. While dry ice is more expensive than regular ice you only need a few pounds of it. Moreover, that cost is nothing compared to the loss you would suffer when all the food gets spoiled.
Get around 10 pounds of dry ice and put it on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Since there is no watery mess, the dry ice turns directly into gas and the cold air sinks down from the top shelf to the lower shelves to keep your entire refrigerator cool. You can also crank up your cooling game by adding a few more blocks of dry ice on every shelf.
While dry ice provides better cooling and helps you avoid a leaky mess it also has a few disadvantages. Since dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, too much of it can be harmful to humans. That’s why you need to ventilate your room properly. When the dry ice turns into vapor it will leak out slowly from the refrigerator. Make sure to keep at least one window in that room open to avoid any buildup.
Apart from that the basic rule of keeping the refrigerator door shut for as long as possible applies here as well. Try not to open the door till the technician arrives to fix your refrigerator.
- Get a cooler – When you get regular ice you need to deal with a leaky mess. However, that can be avoided if you have a few coolers lying around in your home. You can’t go guerilla mode and rest the refrigerator on its back. The back often has important connection points and condenser coils that may get damaged if you lie the refrigerator on its back.
If you have a lot of food that needs to be stored and don’t have enough coolers, you can ask your friends and family to chip in and borrow a few from them. After you get enough coolers, fill them up with ice and wrap the items that need to be stored in plastic wrap before storing them in the cooler. This needs to be done with meat and other such raw ingredients that may get soggy or simply inedible by coming in contact with water and ice.
- Prioritize – Even if you have borrowed a few coolers from friends and family it may not be enough if you have a large French-door refrigerator. That’s why you need to make some hard choices and prioritize. You need to make a list of items that go in the cooler and those that don’t. Items like dairy, raw meat, and other such things that need to be kept frozen will definitely go bad without the cooler.
On the other hand, some condiments can be kept on the kitchen countertop. In fact, they don’t even need to be refrigerated. For instance, you can keep ketchup, fish sauce, soy sauce, vinegar, mustard, and vinegar-based hot sauce outside the refrigerator at room temperature. They won’t go bad. However, cream-based sauces like dressings and mayonnaise need to be refrigerated. You can keep them on the refrigerator door and the residual cool air should be good enough to keep them from spoiling before the technician arrives.
While refrigerating eggs keeps them fresh for a longer duration, you can leave them out at room temperature for a few days without any worries. If there are any leftovers or prepared food, you need to eat them now so that other important items get to be in the cooler. Finally, if there are fruits or veggies you can leave them in the pantry for a day or two.
Conclusion
Everyone is in a pinch when their refrigerator breaks down. No one likes to waste food or money. The above-mentioned techniques can help you keep your food cold till the technician arrives to fix your refrigerator. To hire a technician for fixing your fridge you can search for “refrigerator repair near me”.