[enginerd]

We were without power for three days last winter. I immediately took everything out of the refrigerator and put it in the garage (I put a thermometer out there and the temperature stayed within 2 degrees of our refrigerator). We didn't open the freezers. It worked fine except we had to take a flashlight out to the garage to find what we needed from the fridge. We just didn't cook - we ate alot of peanut butter and jelly and cereal. On the third day we got out an old generator that my dad had given us years ago which we hadn't tried because we weren't sure it would work. DH hooked it up to the freezers and ran it 3 times for 2 hours each throughout the third day. At the end of the third day our electric came back on and we checked our frozen stuff - everything was still frozen solid. We didn't loose anything. Lucky for us we had just put in a new gas fireplace which we used to heat our house. It worked so good that we had to turn it off at times to keep the house from getting too hot.