[bigtimesink]

> Great points - however this can keep your fridge running for 2-3 days (a pretty long outage).

$1,000 buys a lot of groceries. It's cheaper to to have a small supply of shelf stable food for outages.

> It can also do arbitrage and charge when it’s cheap and deploy the power when it’s expensive.

This has the same problem. It takes a long time to make back the $1000.

[nikodunk]

Definitely! It’s primarily backup, and secondarily an arbitrage device :)

The average fridge loss is estimated at $300 per outage, and the average fridge outage insurance claim is $600 I just learned today from an insurance agent at SXSW at our booth (apparently a lot of lobster is bought the day of the outage :P).

[lucb1e]

> The average fridge loss is estimated at $300 per outage

Holy crap, I don't think our fridge fits 300 dollars' worth of food. We have trouble fitting a ~140€ grocery run into the fridge and probably at least half of that is non-refrigerated products. Hard to say how many days' food this is, probably close to a week, so a 36h+ outage (where the fridge actually got warm for a while) would have an average occupancy of much less than the initial 140€, maybe 60 or so? Idk. Not that I remember ever having a power outage longer than 8 hours in my life, neither the Netherlands nor Germany nor Belgium nor Finland (the countries I lived in)

Either Americans and their fridges are built different or this risk (chance & impact) is way overblown

Does this perhaps include opportunity cost where you can't work because you need to get new groceries? Generously, let's say you spend an hour in the store and an hour planning, going, and unpacking, so you'd be valuing those 2h at a consultancy rate of some 100$/hour

[sgerenser]

American fridges are generally much bigger than European ones. Mine is something like 27 cubic feet, which I understand is around double the size of an average European fridge.

I don’t think I’ve ever lost power for long enough that I lost anything in the fridge though, but there are parts of the country with a much less reliable grid (usually due to severe storms or other natural disasters).

[dzhiurgis]

It's pretty simple - europeans are more frequently going to shop. US/AU/NZ drive and do a bigger shop to last half a week or so.

Also most of Europeans live in apartments - your power cables are underground. In suburbs, putting cables are underground is too expensive and overhead wires are easily damaged during storms.

[lucb1e]

Yeah I'll never understand the people that go to the store daily or bidaily to see what's for dinner tonight, that seems like a big waste of time with increased exposure to whatever flu is currently popular. On the other hand, the planning involved in "where will I be, what will I be doing five days from now, will the potatoes have sprouted and the tomatoes be mouldy again by then" is also not fun, but yeah half a week (3-4 days) is the minimum of how often I ideally go

Anyway I was keeping in mind (I mentioned) that one might store a week's worth of food, but now that I consider it again, also in the context of apartments vs. bigger buildings: I don't have a big family that lives with me (no children or parents or so, just partner), so I should perhaps multiply this by two extra persons. It still doesn't add up to more than half of the 300USD figure, but it's less outlandish if the 'average' household is considered to be 4 people who all eat adult-sized portions (as teenagers probably already would)

[bagels]

I lost $1000 in groceries in the Bay Area in 2023. Four multi-day outages on the peninsula.

[vladgur]

I’m on the Peninsula. Don’t remember an outage longer than few hours in my lifetime.

[bagels]

You're lucky. Really varies by where you live. Santa cruz mountains get the worst of it, but other parts like where I am are pretty bad too.