I was about 13-14 hours into a 24+ hour Beef Chuck Roast cook when the power went out. The estimated time for the power to be restored is about 5 hours away. Trying to determine if the meat is a goner. Thanks!
Do you have an outdoor BBQ grill? You might try stoking it up and moving it out to that at a somewhat low temp to keep things at a safe temp until the power is back on!
Once the power is back on you can repackage back into a vacuum bag and toss it back in the bath.
Good luck!
What are you cooking in? It it is uninsulated then it will not survive the interim safely. If t g e cooiing vessel is insulated it may survive.
That meat will be pasteurised inside its bag. Get it cold in an ice bath and put it in the fridge until power comes back. Then resume cooking. If the bag stays sealed, I don’t see how the meat could go bad on you.
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Oh yeah @michihenning !!! Much better idea than mine, and a heck of a lot easier!
@kinzr13 I hope this info reached you in time!
Thanks for the responses everyone. The power actually came back on within the hour so all is good. I guess the power company likes to under-promise and over-deliver when it comes to repair time estimates.
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I solved this by taking an extra APC from my computer room to use when doing long cooks. It has already saved one dinner. It’s worth it.
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I’m guessing you mean UPC. 
What size do you suggest? How long will it keep the APC going when the power goes out? Or is it just enough to filter brown outs and blips?
I’m betting you mean UPS. 
And APC is one of the leading manufacturers of uninterruptible power supplies, so that’s likely what was being referred to.
Yes, it is an APC brand UPS. The size that I recommend? Whatever one you happen to have handy.
Yes, mine are APC brand UPS. I’ve got a couple of them.
Well doesn’t that make life delightfully confusing running your APC on an APC.
You will need at least a 1500VA UPS for this to work. Otherwise, the APC will put too much of a load on the UPS.
The average UPS that can handle this load will be empty at 800 W power consumption after 6–8 minutes. The Anova will turn on the heating element for only part of the time. But, even so, you will get no more than 40–60 minutes out of the UPS before its battery is empty. The exact time depends on room temperature, how hot and large the bath is, and how well insulated the container is.
It hardly seems worth it, unless you happen to be doing a short cook. Prices for a suitable UPS start at around $250 and go up from there, depending on battery capacity and features. On top of that, they are big and weigh around 40–50 pounds.
A UPS doesn’t solve the problem effectively (except for very short outages). But for short outages, the water temperature won’t drop much, almost certainly not far enough or long enough to endanger the cook. Meaning that the UPS doesn’t really achieve anything for short outages either.
How often does power fail in the area where you live? What is the cost of a very occasionally failed cook compared to the cost and inconvenience of having a big and heavy UPS sitting beside the already bulky sous vide container?
I could buy a generator that can deliver 1000 W indefinitely for less than the cost of a UPS that can do the same thing for 8 minutes. At least the generator would be useful for extended outages.
The one scenario where a UPS might make sense if you live in an area with frequent short blips or brown-outs. For any other situation, the UPS is ridiculous, IMO.
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Actually, it would. Take for example my own experience in which a very brief (only a few seconds) power outage occurred after we’d gone to bed, and my APC reset with a 12 lb pork shoulder that was several hours into a cook, with the problem going undetected until the next morning. A UPS…even a modest one…would have prevented the APC from resetting and saved the meat.
Yes. Like I said, it will help if you have a short blip or brown-out. Otherwise, it won’t.
In your case, it would have probably been quite safe to just re-start the cook, seeing that the food had been in there for several hours already and was most likely pasteurised by then.
Or…
It’ll help with a short blip or brown-out because it’ll stop the Anova from stopping.
For outages less than an hour, the UPS doesn’t help much because the water temperature won’t drop all that much during that time. (It does have the advantage that I don’t have to be around to restart the device though when power power comes back.)
For outages of an hour or more, I can’t see a UPS helping at all.
Which achieves something quite useful.
Yes. If I happen to live in an area where that sort of thing has a reasonable probability of actually happening. Otherwise, the UPS is a solution in search of a problem. Big, heavy, and expensive.
That sort of occasional momentary power hit has a reasonable probability of happening just about everywhere. And UPS units that can guard against it are neither big, heavy nor expensive. I have several.