Kitchen Garden Forum

Perhaps not exactly Tools and Machinery.
We have too fairly old chest freezers 14 cubic feet each in old money, say about 800 litres total. While it has been raining I've been tidying up the area where they are and have realised how long they seem to be running for, one in particular the older with the dodgy lid. I had already planned to have a go at that area in the Autumn, it is a divided off end of garage easily accessible from the kitchen, with tiles and shelving and am now thinking about replacing the freezers.
I am wondering about changing to upright for easier management, perhaps we'll get less UFOs (Unidentified Frozen Objects). The way to get the volume, I assume you need more volume because you can't pack as tight, seems to be with a big double door commercial freezer. One problem is these don't seem to be covered by the A A+ A++ rating system of ordinary freezers so I might end up spending more on electricity (must try and get hold of a meter to see what I am using).
I wondered if anybody has any experience of these or any other useful comments about freezers.

Turn the freezer upside down, count ten then turn it right side up. There may be an air block or a 'slug' restricting the system. I would stick with a chest freezer as, unless it has good seals, the cold air can roll out od a freezer when the door is opened. Cheers, Tony.

Modern ones won't work outside the "domestic environment", if the ambient temperature where it is located drops below a certain level, not necessarily below zero centigrade, it ceases to cool and, hey presto defrosted contents.

Dear Peter & Geoff,
bin there, with the frost free freezer. Wretched things. Done that with the upright door as well. Stick with the chest ones Geoff.
Regards Sally Wright.

I echo the choice of chest over upright freezer. We have had both in the past, having chosen an upright because I thought it might be easier to organise, but it certainly looses the cold much more quickly (whilst you are trying to find things!) whereas the chest freezer is only defrosted once a year and stays really cold all the time.

Thanks for your comments. I knew to avoid the frost free models as my sister got caught by one, having said that I over-winter my Dahlia tubers OK nearby so it doesn't go that cold even this Winter. I'm still undecided as my wife's arthritis is getting worse and I thought upright would save all that bending to look for buried treasures (I know inventory lists would help but who does?)

We have upright freezers in the garage that have worked well over last winter. Maybe not ultra modern ones but it was definitely cold in our garage last winter.

I'd caution against hastily investing in a modern freezers. There's been a lot of publicity about them not surviving in very cold evironments like sheds or garages and if you search around on the internet you'll probably find more technical information. We've toyed with replacing our 30 year old upright Electrolux freezer stored in our garage for a more energy efficient one but every time we've enquired about storage conditions for modern freezers we've been told that they are very unreliable when stored in cold conditions. Our elderly freezer has functioned quite reliably through the past two winters in probably sub zero garage conditions, so we've decided to leave well alone. As there arn't any moving parts on a freezer to go wrong, we're hoping it will last for a few years yet. Any saving in electricity associated with buying a replacement would probably soon be offset by the fact that when stored in cold conditions they often can only have a life of four or five years.

We store different types of product on different shelves so know roughly where everything is we need and the door doesn't need to be open for very long. And as it's kept pretty full, it only seems to need defrosting every couple of years.

Hello Geoff
We had a similar problem with the freezer in our village hall - staying on for long periods. My neighbour who knows all there is to know about these things said that the freezer had lost some gas - they do this slowly over the years apparently - hence it was working harder and and harder. Same thing happens to the air con in a car. The option is either to have it regassed or replace it. This one was very old and shabby so we replaced it.

John

Evening Geoff, freezers are not really my thing but, is there anyway you could do a rotational basket system in the freezer. You could then swap them around, so your wife can use stuff out of the top ones.

Don't laugh, it was just a thought.