Preparing for Winter V

-taff

No. But it does go a funny yellow/green colour when frozen, but don't worry, goes back to white when thawed.

bluesooz

fionaandphil  I've just been doing a stock take of the freezers, for stocking up for winter.  It's all organised for now, although the next 2 weeks meals will be based on eating all the older foods that were buried and we'd been using the newer ones and all those 'ooh I'd forgotten we had a pack of them" items!  

Laura_Elsewhere

Re filling spaces in a freezer with bottles of water - some years ago we had a driving-holiday round various relatives and friends and wanted to be able to do our own lunches en route each day. We bought a large expanded-polystyrene fish-box (!) online which has lasted perfectly, still living in its cardboard box from posting - we froze four 2-litre plastic bottles of water for three days and when we returned five or six days later, they still had large lumps of ice floating in the partial-thawing water, having sat in the fish-box in the back of the car the whole time, on the south coast of England in a hot August. Maybe as much as half the ice still in a lump - we'd opened the box as briefly as possible but it was opened several times a day for getting out cold drinks as well as the cold meat, cheese, butter and salad for lunches...
So I would expect that, if your freezer isn't very full, fitting a plastic bottle of water across the front of each drawer and leaving it there frozen could make a considerable difference in the event of power-cuts. 

Also, we totally recommend fish-boxes if you want an insulated box We use it for when we defrost the freezer, and for keeping drinks cold in heatwaves - very useful thing - even in a small flat it earns its keep!

Si_Clist

jamanda said:

It is the freezer situation that bothers me if the electric goes off.  Very full.

Can you not lessen the worry by reducing your reliance on the freezer? 

ETA - As regulars here will know, whenever milk's mentioned I can't stop myself saying ... Nestlé Nido!

C_J

If you ever get locked out of your account here Si and need to change your user name, just come back as Nido_and_Canning and we'll know exactly who you are

My winter preps : the woodburner was installed yesterday. I am ridiculously excited.

Si_Clist

C_J said:

If you ever get locked out of your account here Si and need to change your user name, just come back as Nido_and_Canning and we'll know exactly who you are

My winter preps : the woodburner was installed yesterday. I am ridiculously excited.

Like it lots!  Congrats on the woodburner - and that reminds me I have news about logs to impart as soon as I get a minute ...

Si_Clist

OK ... pay attention at the back if you buy logs for your woodburner!

We get our logs from a chap who's been logging (supplying round timber to other log suppliers as well as retailing logs) for considerably longer than the 15 years we've dealt with him.  He was here earlier today, apologising profusely for the 20% price increase, and for what it's worth he tells me that the price of any logs anywhere is bound to go up considerably next year.

Apparently anyone supplying logs to the likes of you and me is going to have to be licenced by DEFRA before May 2022.  It's going to cost him £4000 to start with, and then there's other costs involved purely on the paperwork front (I forget what exactly but it did seem crazy).

Not only that, but he's actually going to have to buy a bigger vehicle to use for deliveries in order to meet some of the DEFRA requirements.  So, greatly increased overheads, and then there's the simple fact that the price of standing timber is going up and up and up because of increasing demand, including from power companies doing their bit of greenwashing.

And what's all this bureaucracy for?  As far as I can see it's all about another token gesture towards planet-saving ...

fionaandphil

@Si_Clist quite glad we bought a new chainsaw and logsplitter this year now!  We haven't ever had to buy logs and are in the lucky position that any scrap wood is donated to us by friends, family and our builder.  We get a shout everytime anybody has a tree that needs chopped up or a pile of wood leftover from a project so will happily carry on with that.  This year we had some work done on one of our very big sycamore trees and they thankfully chopped it into smaller sized logs for us which we have just split and added to the woodpile for winter 2022.  It looks like even logburners and fires will become more expensive.  Thanks for the information

Primrose

I believe I may have read somewhere in recent monhs the government was thinking of banning certain wood burners because of air pollution but perhaps I'm  mistaken ?

C_J

Thanks for the heads-up, @Si_Clist.

We're another chainsaw- and logsplitter-owning family, living very rurally and luckily with access to a plentiful supply of our own wood - I've lived here for 36 years and have never yet had to buy logs.  Two years ago we had a mahoosive apple tree - taller than our house - chopped down as it was on its way out after probably a century, and that will be ready for burning this winter. This year's removal of a large sycamore and several big nut trees for similar reasons will see us through next winter. We re-plant as we go, we're lucky to have quite a sizeable arboretum.

These new DEFRA rules are crazy.