We bought a new freezer

[panasonicvac]

Happy Holidays everyone! We just bought a new freezer a couple weeks ago and the delivery came today. This new GE replaced our Frigidaire flat freezer. There was nothing wrong with the Frigidaire. We bought this upright freezer because we were tired of using the flat freezer. The problem was that once stuff gets put into the bottom, you'd then forget about it and we'd have to throw them out later because they'd be expired or bad. So we ended up giving that flat freezer to my brother as his Christmas present so he can use it for taxidermy. So far, this appears to work really good. We now have four upright freezers. Enjoy!

 

[bradfordwhite]

Four freezers?
Is this for a business or is there something going that maybe the authorities should know about?

Do you mean you had a chest freezer? No one's ever had a "flat freezer"

 

[panasonicvac]

Yup, nope, and yup. We have a Kenmore Commercial, a Whirlpool Gold, and a Kelvinator. Plus the freezer next to our fridge in the kitchen which is a GE. And we have a couple of portable fridges as well with small freezers inside of them, a GE and a Galanz. We have four freezers because why not? And yes it is technically a chest freezer but we call it a flat freezer.

 

[bradfordwhite]

I don't know, it almost sounds like you are collecting freezers.  There might be a few people around here who would understand such behaviour, I don't know..... hmmmm.

 

So are all these freezers plugged in and working?  If so, is there something inside of them?

 

[turbokinetic]

Nice!  Those are more convenient, but they depend heavily on the door gasket to keep the denser, cold air from falling out the bottom, and drawing in moisture laden air at the top. Keep that gasket in good order and it should serve well for a long time!

 

[petek]

Made in Thailand of all places. shouldn't be surprised as my LG front loader was made in Vietnam.

 

[panasonicvac]

Yes they all work, we wouldn't want to have a freezer that doesn't work And all of them have food inside.

 

[combo52]

Home freezers

I can certainly understand having good freezer capacity around. I’ve had two full sized upright freezers in my kitchen for the last 35 years, and two matching all refrigerators, and there’s usually just one or two of us around here, but I put them to good use.

Are used to have an 18 ft.³ chest freezer before I redid the kitchen 35 years ago And I really like the chest freezer. It just wouldn’t fit into the kitchen plan and I wanted to have it on the same level as the kitchen in the house.

I never had any trouble keeping a chest freezer organized I just made different categories from left to right and you get about twice as much stuff per cubic foot in a chest freezer because you don’t have to pack it between shelves and you don’t have to worry about it falling on your feet and breaking your toes. The other big advantage of a chest freezer is it has a much more consistent temperature and it’s only 1/3 as likely to break down as a frost free upright freezer which is always a big consideration when you have a lot of frozen food on hand and as David said you don’t really have to worry about gaskets on the chest freezer they’re not nearly so critical.

An upright freezer it is easier to see what’s in there although I still lose plenty of stuff in the back.

It’ll be interesting to see how this Thailand built freezer holds up in general. The freezers that are available in the US these days are not like they used to be that’s for sure.

John
It’s kind of amazing that we’re importing something that large halfway around the world.

 

[petek]

The days of importing these finsished large appliances and furniture may be coming to an end in the not too distant future because of escalating shipping costs. And with China and Korea, escalating labor costs themselves. The days of shipping a packed 40' container from Asia to a west coast port for a couple of thousand bucks is over. Not to mention the trucking and rail furtherance costs have also escalated making it less and less attractive without raising the prices of the goods substantially, ergo making manufacturing or at least some of the assembly in the west much more economically attractive.

 

[bradfordwhite]

The illusion of saving money with a (or numerous) food freezers. The idea is one can buy stuff "in bulk" and "save" money by freezing food until needed. All fine and good ....if one follows through with that pattern.

Usually works best with a large volume of people. If there's only one or two people....unless they have a serious eating disorder... the economics aren't supported.

You can't be "losing track" of food items and food isn't to be going bad from being in there too long.
There shouldn't be large open unused space in there either.

When food goes bad the cost of the food item is <span style="text-decoration: underline;">still incurred</span> even though it's been thrown out. All it takes is a few items to go bad to wipe out any savings one had, plus you have to add in operation costs and in this case, the expense of a brand new freezer.

Heaven forbid the electric goes out or the compressor fails, or some other service emergency happens and the food thaws and goes bad. The value of all that food counts against you because you spent the money. Even if it's food you've grown or animals you killed and had processed. All those things have value.

I went through this with my mother who had a 15 c.f. almond Kenmore chest freezer from 1989. Everytime I looked in there is was a sea of frost and bits of packaged food items sticking out of the frost unrecognizable. Only in the center were there a handful of useable items ... in this 15 c.f. behemoth. She seemed resigned to having a freezer even though it was just the two of them and they had a 24 c.f. side-by-side.

Since the freezer was a tight fit in the room it was in, she thought it would be there forever, ticking away, adding up on the electric bill and making noise pollution...

Nope, one day when they were out, I got the dolly, removed the lid, took it outside, tipped it on it's side, took the hose to it and washed all the frost and dirt that was on the side out, and put it back together in the garage. She ended up selling it.

And they seriously didn't need it or miss it. It was just a habit and an expensive one at that. It was just an excuse to waste food and money.

I only have a small 3.5 c.f. chest freezer. And that's too big for me. I did an experiment earlier this year and turned off the freezer and redesigned my eating patterns for a life with no freezer.

What I found is I ate healthier and it helped me to lose weight. Plus I saved on not buying frozen food and on electric costs.
I'll probably replace what I have with a small 1.1 c.f. freezer soon.

 

[appnut]

To each their own. 'Nuff said!!!!!

 

[sudsmaster]

I've had my Kenmore ~14.5 cu ft chest freezer for probably about 20 years now. Still works fine. However I probably need to clean it out because I've sort of lost track of what I put in there a couple years ago.

 

It's my understanding that chest freezers are more energy efficient than upright freezers. Probably because all the cold air doesn't exit every time you open the lid, as it can with an upright freezer door.

 

One problem I've noticed with the chest freezer is that it's easy to overfill it and not notice right away. But due to the lid not closing all the way from the overfilling, moisture from the room air can enter and cause frost on the inner front of the chest cavity. And that's what I just observed when measuring the inner chest. Probably time for a scraping, and, later, moving all the contents out for a full defrost. This one has a little "flash defrost" pin one can pull, which can run current through some coils in the walls to melt any accumulated ice, which can speed up the defrost process. There is also a drain at the front of the cabinet.

 

[fan-of-fans]

We did the same thing about 8 years ago.

Had a small Sears “Galaxy” that worked great but got tired of having to dig around in it, and don’t miss having to defrost it.

Haven’t had any problems with the upright one, it’s a Frigidaire made Kenmore.

 

[bradfordwhite]

Big freezers have a notorious reputation.

Big, coffin like, boxy type things...if you know what I mean.

I don't think there is any other HOME appliance that has that reputation.

 

[neptunebob]

I always wondered about the "flash defrost"

That Kenmore had. Did it turn the freezer into a heat pump for a few minutes? Is this the "hot gas" system?

Kind of related, why isn't the "hot gas" system used in refrigerators today? It seems it would be more energy efficient than electric heaters.

 

[combo52]

Cold spot, flash defrost chest, freezer servers

Originally, when Sears sold these, it was an electric heater behind the liner of the chest freezers. These were whirlpool built chest freezers. There’s a high switch inside the lid. You open the lid and you pull the button down and it would activate an electric heater that would warm up the inside walls of the freezers to around 50° and make all the frost just melt and/or fall off Made for a very quick defrost. the switch to activate. It was designed so that when you close the lid, it would turn it off, so there was no chance of defrosting a load of frozen food. It turned the compressor off while it was defrosting.

They certainly could’ve used a hot gas defrost system. I’m not sure why they didn’t and that’s an excellent question Bob I’ve been asking refrigeration engineers for a long time why they don’t use hot gas defrost in modern refrigerators. It would certainly seem that it would be much more energy efficient to use 150 W compressor acting as a heat pump instead of turning on a 400 W electric heater maybe somebody else knows the answer to that.

John.

 

[sudsmaster]

I doubt that the "hot gas" method of defrosting would save much energy vs. the electric coil method, because a chest freezer only needs defrosting every couple of years or so. In my experience, the electric coils melt the frost in perhaps 30 minutes to an hour.  And it is probably more expensive to mfg a gas driven system than an electric system, as well as the gas system being more liable to break down.

 

Mainly I see frost in my chest freezer when I've over-filled it and the lid hasn't closed completely. That's what's recently happened, so time to get out the scraper and get rid of some of the frost.