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I have the ubiquitous 2,000 watt Honda generator. I have 20 gallons of ethanol-free gasoline in the garage I use for my outboard and lawn mower. My car tank is always full so I have another 18 gallons I can syphon off there. I have several gallons of lamp oil for the hurricane lamps. I have a fireplace and firewood. I have a Weber gas grill with a spare propane tank. I can run my fridge off the generator. I can cook. I'm on town water so I'm OK there for a few days. I have city gas so the water heater should be OK for a few days. I'm below grade for town sewer so I'd have to use the generator to drive the macerating pump in the holding tank every couple of days. I can run the boiler for heat occasionally. I've done that a few times when ice storms knocked out power for several days. That on 3 hour intervals twice per day, the gas range, and the fireplace is enough to be fine in subzero.
The big inconvenience would be that I don't have 220v for my air conditioning. After a hurricane, it's usually hot/humid for a week afterwards.
I keep the chest freezer in the garage packed full... when I have extra space a freeze two liter water bottles.... chest freezer are tops at keeping in the cold.
Have assorted generators with a super quiet 1000W Honda to a 5000W Honda plus my service van has two inverters providing 120V power plus the truck has a fuel transfer pump that draws off the 36 gallon fuel tank.
Food have a large assortment of canned and dry goods... Safeway has Progresso Soup for a $1 a can so I rotate and stock up...
Water purification filters and tablets on hand and Coleman gasoline lanterns and stove in addition to BBQ
A couple of cords of seasoned Oak in the woodshed and solar charger for cell phones or use the car.
We have frequent power failures where I live. In my experience, food retention depends mostly on the ambient temperature. At 80*F, like we see in outage-producing summer thunderstorms, you're going to lose meat/dairy/leftovers in your fridge by 24-48 hrs max with an extra day for produce, and your refrigerator's freezer compartment isn't far behind. You might as well just take everything out and eat it, starting with the ice cream. If your chest freezer is packed full of things like roasts that are frozen solid with frozen water jugs in excess space, and you don't open the door at all, you may get a few days. Frozen dinners, whose packages are only half full of chopped up food pieces, don't last long at all. If you desperately try to leave food in there after it's begun to spoil, you may find yourself replacing an irreversibly malodorous appliance when the power comes back on.
We have below-freezing temps during the winter so we just put everything out in a snowbank, but keeping humans and pets, as well as our water supply, from freezing solid is more important, so I have a 14kw generator with a 500 gal propane tank.
Voice of experience......it takes a while to charge your phone in the car......we usually only got it up to 20% in about an hour of driving after Irma.
We were able to go to a library that had power to use their internet and charge the phone and laptop. Also could charge it at work. Some wind up radios have a place to charge your phone too, but tried that in Mathew last year and ave up because it took too long.
OP you said you live in an apartment? Ground floor? Interior front door or door from outside ? Generators can kill you or your neighbors in an apartment unless they are far enough from the building and the fumes are not drawn in through doors and windows. What you can run off them will depend on what size you get.
During our 7 days and 7 long nights without power from Irma we used 10 gallons of gas for about every 10 hours we ran the generator(usually 8pm-8AM). Close to $30 a night to run 2 fans on the patio while we slept out there. Nothing feels better than cold showers to cool you off, too. We were lucky we have city water, but most houses here have wells so without electricity you have no water.
For lights we used lanterns that used D batteries and had the led option on them. Just enough light to dimly light a room and did not have to change batteries in the 7 nights of use....still same batteries we used in Mathew for 4 days last year too.
Only had bags of fruits and veggies in the side freezer and they were juice in just 3 days. As your freezer/refrigerator warms up, the water drips into the pan under it and makes a huge mess because it is not circulating and evaporating without the power on. Bags of ice do not help when they melt. Makes a bigger mess. So have some coolers to use to store cold food and ice. It is recommended that everything in your refrigerator be thrown out if no power for 3 days . We are still replacing items this week-spreading out the cost because it adds up fast.
We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and stuff from cans. We bought meat to grill or meat from Publix deli like chicken, subs, etc on the way home from work.
To keep an apartment warm could you use a kerosene heater....most of my family in Illinois have one of those to use in rooms that stay cool even when they have heat.
I was born and raised in North Carolina. People usually think of Florida when they think about hurricanes, but we've had our fair share, too. When Hurricane Irene hit in August of 2011, for example, my husband and I went without power for over a week. It was SO hot.
Last year, we got lucky during Hurricane Matthew and didn't have to go without power for more than a couple of hours, but at my mom's house about 25 minutes away, there was no power for over 2 weeks. AND the roads near her were impassable due to some very serious flooding (thank goodness her home wasn't flooded)...she was completely stuck. They are STILL working on fixing the roads around there (although she's obviously not stuck anymore...thank goodness.) She was semi-well prepared, and she lives across the street from her sister, who was even more prepared. I shudder to think about the situation she might have been in if these two things weren't the case. Two weeks is a long time to be without power or the ability to get to any type of store for someone who has their head in the clouds and who didn't prepare ahead of time. After all, how many people just grocery shop by the day?
You're already doing a good thing by stocking up on tons of water. That's the most important thing. In this type of situation, you'll also want to fill up your bathtubs before the storm hits so that you can use the water for things like flushing your toilet, if necessary. You won't want to waste your bottled water supply for that.
Not sure if there is a better option, but we charge our phones and laptops in the car. I suppose that wouldn't work if the car was completely flooded out, which was a real possibility during Matthew, so it's probably something I should think about and prepare for in the future.
Before hurricanes, a lot of people tend to buy things like milk, which I don't really understand. It's going to be one of the first things to go bad.
I like to cook things that fare okay and taste okay at room temperature right before the storm hits -- think fried chicken or pizza. I know food safety regulations might say that room temp isn't okay for these things, but if they're refrigerated beforehand, we don't have a problem eating them for a day or so after the power goes out, depending on how hot it is in the house. Take this advice at your own risk, of course.
We also buy a lot of junk food before a hurricane. Granola bars, cereal bars, Beanie Weenies (hubby likes them cold), Chef Boyardee, nabs, etc. Also, bread and peanut butter. And of course, chips and cookies. Maybe it's not the healthiest. Stuff like that is so easy, though, and it's optimal in a high-stress and uncomfortable situation.
A campfire cookstove is perfect. Or the grill.
Before the storm hits, fill up as many gallon jugs and other similar containers as possible with water, then stash them in all of the empty spaces in your refrigerator and freezer. They'll help keep things cold for as long as possible (avoid opening the door unless necessary!), and they serve as a backup water supply.
A generator is ideal. One that is large enough to power the entire house is a big investment. A small one that will run your fridge and such isn't so much. But I see you live in an apartment, so probably not an option. We actually still haven't purchased one and should.
Of course, you need flash lights and batteries, candles, lanterns. I'm partial to lighting a couple of candles in the living room and then using the flashlights to trek outside of the common areas or late at night, after you've blown out the candles for the evening.
The one thing we couldn't really deal with was the heat after Irene. Taking cold showers (the only kind we could take anyway!) was shocking at first, but it helped. Sitting in the car and running the air conditioning for a little bit was a waste of fuel but was a necessity a couple of times a day.
If you want to keep your freezer contents frozen longer, do this:
Add 1/2 cup salt to each gallon of water, and pour into containers of whatever size you wish, then freeze them. Because these are not pure water, they don't freeze or melt at 32F. They freeze at about 12F, and will keep your freezer at 12F rather than 32F in a power outage.
We fill everything from quart containers to gallon containers with the salt water solution - they fit into all the empty nooks and crannies of the freezer. In winter, we freeze them outdoors, rather than use the freezer to do this. That way, they keep the freezer full all winter. We use them in the fridge, too, which helps to save power to keep an empty-ish fridge at ideal temps.
Most of the year it is not as warm here as Puerto Rico is. I have a chest freezer loaded with frozen dinners that I buy when they are sale. I'm sure I could keep everything frozen for 24 hours with no power. After that I expect I would start to lose some of the food. The rest would be in various degrees of coldness. I'm not really sure how many days it would last. It's not something I want to test. But if I decided to get a portable gas generator, I could probably hook that up to the freezer a couple of times a day to get it cold again. In that case I could keep it cold until I run out of gas.
As an Irma survivor we were told to drop the temperature on the fridge/freezer as low as possible in case the power went out (which it did for most everybody). Here's a hint about knowing whether your frozen food is safe to eat. Freeze a bottle of water almost to the top. Put a penny in the top, put it in the freezer and when the power does come back on see where the penny is. If it's at the top, you're good to go, in the middle of the bottle it might be iffy and if it's at the bottom your food is now garbage. It smelled like a dead body around here with all the spoiled food in garbage bags at the curb.
OP you said you live in an apartment? Ground floor? Interior front door or door from outside ? Generators can kill you or your neighbors in an apartment unless they are far enough from the building and the fumes are not drawn in through doors and windows. What you can run off them will depend on what size you get.
During our 7 days and 7 long nights without power from Irma we used 10 gallons of gas for about every 10 hours we ran the generator(usually 8pm-8AM). Close to $30 a night to run 2 fans on the patio while we slept out there. Nothing feels better than cold showers to cool you off, too. We were lucky we have city water, but most houses here have wells so without electricity you have no water.
For lights we used lanterns that used D batteries and had the led option on them. Just enough light to dimly light a room and did not have to change batteries in the 7 nights of use....still same batteries we used in Mathew for 4 days last year too.
Only had bags of fruits and veggies in the side freezer and they were juice in just 3 days. As your freezer/refrigerator warms up, the water drips into the pan under it and makes a huge mess because it is not circulating and evaporating without the power on. Bags of ice do not help when they melt. Makes a bigger mess. So have some coolers to use to store cold food and ice. It is recommended that everything in your refrigerator be thrown out if no power for 3 days . We are still replacing items this week-spreading out the cost because it adds up fast.
We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and stuff from cans. We bought meat to grill or meat from Publix deli like chicken, subs, etc on the way home from work.
To keep an apartment warm could you use a kerosene heater....most of my family in Illinois have one of those to use in rooms that stay cool even when they have heat.
Ground floor exterior front door which comes out under the stairs to the second floor. With enough cord the generator could sit out in the parking lot, maybe 20 or 30 feet from the building. I'm sure my neighbors would not like it though, and it would probably be a violation of my lease. But in an emergency I might be able to get away with it.
But I'm not real big on that idea anyway. I'm leaning more to the suggestions for a butane stove to heat the food, and maybe if the roads were passable I would drive to an area with power and buy some block ice or dry ice to help keep the food frozen. I'm not really looking to spend much money on this project anyway. I just need some basic option to heat food in an emergency.
I would consider the option of staying in my car. In that case I might be inclined to drive to some place with power, if roads were passable.
and you had or could buy fuel
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If your chest freezer is packed full of things like roasts that are frozen solid with frozen water jugs in excess space, and you don't open the door at all, you may get a few days. Frozen dinners, whose packages are only half full of chopped up food pieces, don't last long at all. If you desperately try to leave food in there after it's begun to spoil, you may find yourself replacing an irreversibly malodorous appliance when the power comes back on.
