The recent snow storm that caused our electrical service to be unavailable for a day reminded us of the household damage these outages could cause. Luckily we have a wood stove for heating and a backup generator to power essential items such as basic lighting, well pump, Internet router and freezers. The big questions during an extended power outage are of course, when will the power be restored, and if food stored in a freezer is OK. It is very tempting and a bad idea to open a freezer during a power outage to check the temperature.
After the recent power outage I did some searching and found this wireless freezer alarm for around $20. This alarm comes with 2 wireless sensors which are placed inside a refrigerator or freezer and allow me to monitor temperatures without opening the doors. This device will also set off an audible alarm if the temperature inside the freezer gets too high.
In the past we had close calls with our freezers when the household power was on but the circuit breaker was tripped. A couple of months ago the circuit breaker to the freezers was tripped after power was restored from an outage. At that time we had two freezers plugged into the same outlet and the circuit breaker was overloaded when both freezers tried to start at the same time. We didn't notice the tripped circuit breaker for several hours and were lucky to get the freezers online before any damage occurred. To correct this problem I installed a second dedicated outlet on a different breaker panel. We also installed indicator lights in each of the receptacles to warn us of tripped circuit breakers and discourage additional loads on these circuits.
No comments:
Post a Comment