---
title: "How Long Food Stays Safe When the Power Goes Out"
description: "Four hours in a closed refrigerator, 48 hours in a full freezer, 24 in a half-full one. What to keep and what to throw, and how to read the highest"
url: "https://thermadormiami.support/blog/how-long-food-stays-safe-without-power/"
date_modified: "2026-08-18"
Category: "Safety & Risks"
---


# How Long Food Stays Safe When the Power Goes Out

## The numbers

- **Refrigerator: about four hours** with the door kept closed.- **Full freezer: about 48 hours.** Half full, about 24.- **The threshold: 40°F.** Food held above it for more than two cumulative hours should go.

Those are national food-safety figures and they assume the doors stay shut. Every opening costs a meaningful share of the time you have left, which is why the most useful thing anybody does during an outage is nothing at all.

## Before the storm, if you have warning

- **Turn both cabinets colder** the day before. A column that starts at the bottom of its range buys hours.- **Fill the freezer's gaps** with containers of water. Frozen mass is thermal storage and it is free.- **Freeze a cup of water, then set a coin on top of the ice.** If you come home and the coin is at the bottom of the cup, the freezer thawed completely while you were away — regardless of what the display says now.- **Move what matters most** to the freezer's center, and to the coldest part of the refrigerator.

## During

Keep the doors closed. That is the whole strategy.

If the outage is going to run past the figures above, a cooler with ice for the few things you genuinely need is better than opening a column repeatedly. On a built-in, opening the door does more damage than on a freestanding unit, because there is no room-temperature air being replaced by anything cold.

**Generators.** If you run the column from one, it wants a stable supply. These cabinets publish a low-voltage state — the display simply goes dark and no button responds — and cycling in and out of that is harder on the compressor than being off. Undersized generators are a real cause of the calls we take the week after a storm.

## When the power comes back

**Read the alarm before you clear it.** Press ALARM on a Thermador column and it shows the highest temperature the cabinet reached while you were away, for a few seconds, once. That single number answers the whole food question better than any inspection of the food will.

Then:

- **Freezer:** anything with ice crystals, or at or below 40°F, is fine to refreeze. Anything that thawed and sat warm goes.- **Refrigerator:** the two-hour rule above 40°F. Meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy and leftovers are the ones to be strict about; hard cheese, butter, whole fruit and unopened condiments are far more forgiving.- **Do not taste anything to decide.** Nothing about how food smells or looks is a reliable test.

## What we get called about afterwards

A column that will not restart, one that alarms and clears repeatedly, and one that runs constantly without pulling back down. The first is often a supply issue rather than the appliance; the second usually resolves as the cabinet recovers; the third is worth a visit, particularly if the condenser has not been cleaned in years.

If the cabinet has not returned to temperature within a day of the power coming back, that is the point to call rather than the point to wait through another warm night. [What a warm column usually turns out to be](/symptoms/refrigerator-not-cooling/) starts with the cheap causes, and so do we.

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