Southern Belle sent me out to buy a 7 cubic foot, chest freezer. Menards has them for sale for $200 which is about what people are selling used ones on Craigslist.
She plans to use a six-tub system. Three stacks of two tubs. The bottom tub is "fill" and the top tub is "use". One stack will be vegetables. Another will be fruits-and-bagels. The last stack, the one over the compressor (which is a smaller space) will be meat-and-dairy.
The big problem with chest freezers is that they fill up with food that cannot be seen or accessed. The cook might know the food is in the freezer but cannot take the time to dig through the hodge-podge...either that or they get frostbitten fingers.
In our chest freezer we put the "big meat" in a layer on the bottom. Each food group goes in a different colored supermarket bag, with a color-coded menu taped to the top of the freezer. My wife, being a person of lists, keeps a hard copy running inventory. "Honey, please pull a pork tenderloin from the red bag?" Works for us. I do find the thought of tubs interesting.
ReplyDeleteStill need to get a freezer
ReplyDeleteGot from the 'zon multiple wire baskets. After several careful measurements. Giving up some cubic capacity, but everything better organized and not in a big pile.
ReplyDeleteOur vacuum sealer is a storage life changer. Bags Sharpie marked w/contents and date. Things do look alike after frozen.
We also maintain a spreadsheet of what's where, how many, and dates. For the usual, 'what's for dinner?', a quick glance, 'oh, we have some older rotisserie chicken we need to use up'.
Thirding? Fourthing? the spreadsheet or list idea. Even in our split refrigerator/freezer unit, things still get lost.
ReplyDeleteMy personal experience with packing freezers full of food (elk, deer, moose, salmon & halibut) is that while a chest freezer is cheaper and more efficient, an upright freezer results in far better access and thus utilization of the contents. I just got tired of digging out old freezer burned meat that had been "lost" in the bottom of the freezer. Can't really price wild salmon, halibut or moose - but, while the dogs love it, it pains me to not eat it myself. For roughly double your initial outlay you could find a comparably sized upright - and over the life of the freezer you might find that you save money by not having to throw away as much food.
ReplyDeleteWAG here....maybe vacuum seal prior to freezing.
DeleteI HEARTILY second this! If you vacuum seal your meat it will NOT freezer burn! It will literally keep for YEARS! A vacuum sealer is WELL WORTH the money and added effort!! That "lost" meat at the bottom of the freezer becomes unearthed GOLD when found! The only losers will be the dogs!
DeleteI second the motion for an Upright.
ReplyDeleteChest Freezers are just hard to use, and given todays efficiencies, I doubt that they are that much cheaper to operate.
Besides, my Wife is only 4'11" and the chest freezers, (except for the smallest) is just too hard for her to use.
I have one of each. I believe the chest is more efficient, but its true the upright is easier to access.
DeleteJoe, how are things at home? Your body wouldn’t fit in a 7 cubic foot freezer, would it??
ReplyDeleteIt would if it were trimmed a wee bit with a chainsaw.
DeleteOne more vote for the upright freezer . Definitely more convenient , and takes up less floor space ( for us, that's a major plus) .
ReplyDeleteI am looking for the type with the coil in the shelves. I am hoping for quicker freezing of whole chickens, maybe fan assisted.
ReplyDeleteThe colder and faster the freeze, the better the thawed product. Any advice appreciated.
And I had a tank of a GE chest freezer that ran from before I was born in the early '50's until '04. Just wouldn't quit.
I join the choir in favor of the upright freezer; perhaps two smaller ones vice one large one. We have a big 28CF upright in the garage, and it suffers the from same issues as the chest freezer; stuff gets pushed into the back of it and lost. We also have a much smaller upright in the barn; the kind where the shelves are the coils. Even when that one is full, you can see everything in it. Why TWO smaller ones? They will give you the capacity of the larger chest freezer, but when your frozen foods start to dwindle between "trips to town," you can shut one off and save some on electricity. And... worst case scenario, if one of them craps out, you'll only lose half of your frozen food; less, if you can move some of it from the dead unit to the remaining good one.
ReplyDeleteWile uprights are more easily accessed, chest freezers are much more economical.....even if you don't open them.
ReplyDeleteWhen you open an upright freezer, all the cold air "falls" out the bottom. With a chest freezer it stays....which is why supermarket use open topped freezers to sell/display frozen foods.
In a power out scenario, the chest freezer will stay frozen longer. Like twice as long.
Less convenient but more economical. Take yer choice.
As an aside, for any freezer, if you take a small plastic tub, like shot glass size (Tupperware used to make some) and freeze it 3/4 full of water, then put a penny or a small washer onto the top of that ice.....it makes an easy detector for if the freezer has ever gotten warm enough to unfreeze the contents. As long as the penny is on top, the freezer has stayed cold enough. If it ever drops into the water column, the freezer has, at some point, gotten above 32F/0C. If you are like me and may not check/open/access the freezer for a week or more, this is a handy telltale to have.
Another note on freezers; dedicated freezers are usually used for long term storage, and aren't accessed daily like the kitchen freezer is. The danger here is that the unit will quietly go off to Valhalla, unbeknownst to you until you access it perhaps weeks later. This happened to the chest freezer in my barn. I lost over $300.00 (pre-Biden) in meat, including the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas prime rib. And the STINK!!! This thing had been off for several days in Desert Southwest summer heat!!! I have since put remote sensors in all my refrigeration. I use a net-enabled product called SensorPush. I have no affiliation with the product or the company other than that of a consumer. You buy a net-enabled gateway and as many sensors as you need. The gateway communicates through a smartphone app. Yes, depending on the number of refrigeration units you have, you'll pay a bit for them, but if it saves your bacon even ONCE it will have paid for itself. Even if you don't have internet the sensors are bluetooth capable, though you'll need to pass close enough to the sensor for it to register on the phone app.
ReplyDeleteThe sensors can be individually named. You can set them to alert you if what they're monitoring goes above or below temps and humidity you set. The sensors will alert you when their batteries get low, and the app will let you know if it hasn't been able to touch the gateway for a couple of hours.
The only downside to the alerts is that machines don't know day from night, and you might be alerted to a problem, a low battery, or loss of contact with the gateway in the middle of the night...
Since deploying these sensors they have saved my frozen food several times when freezer and fridge doors were left ajar. Other incidents of note were when the cooling coil on the big upright freezer in the garage froze up and hampered its cooling, and... AND... another time when the CAT played with the power cord on that same freezer and UNPLUGGED IT!
If you don't want to go in the hole for something like SensorPush then PLEASE have SOME kind of thermometer on the freezer, or sooner or later you'll get bit...
A VERY important point!
DeleteHi, my 2 cents.. We use a magnetic whiteboard. With erasable pens. We write what we put in the freezer,, we erase it when we take it out,, it works quite well actually..
ReplyDeleteBaskets or bins is a good idea! And uprights are actually 'better' if you're accessing them regularly.
ReplyDeleteHave three 7.2 cu ft chest freezers, no upright. Looked at "consolidating" into 1 upright, couldn't find a customer review that didn't ID every brand as a failure waiting to happen. If I lose 1 freezer I - may - lose what's in it but that's only 1/3 of the total. I found plastic bins that juuuuusssst fit, tossed the lids and punched them full of holes for circulation, added rope handles. A plastic trash can juuussstt fits over the compressor "shelf". A pair of 3/4 X 3/4 square dowels on top of each bin keep the bins separated, easy to lift 3 bins out to get to the bottom one. Food is distributed across all 3, did NOT dedicate one to meats, one to veggies, etc. in case one fails what I - may - lose is "balanced. My house alarm system has as an option temperature sensors, one sits next to the water heater piping in the garage, the other 4 are in the freezers and kitchen fridge. I get a text alarm message if any of the freezers go above +10F or the fridge hits 50F. Buy one to test to make sure the signal can reach WiFi from inside the freezer or fridge. Each freezer is connected to power through a Refrigmatic surge suppressor, don't need the surge (I have a whole house surge suppressor in the meter box where it's the first thing a surge will encounter), but a little extra doesn't hurt, biggie is Refrigmatic has a 3-minute "time out" if power is lost so the compressor doesn't try to restart immediately when it's still under pressure. Amazon sells "failed circuit alarms" that screech like a smoke detector if the circuit the appliance is plugged into loses power. Not cheap - they used to be about $32, now $60 - but I only need 2 - 2 of the freezers share a circuit and the 3rd freezer and kitchen fridge are on the same circuit. +1 on a simple "freezer inventory spreadsheet" without it you'll forget what you have, how old it is and what freezer it's in.
ReplyDeleteTotal cost of ownership goes to the chest freezer. Also use 2 stacks of milk crates in a similar system. I have decided that my freezer space will be primarily for protein, to be bought now as a hedge against inflation. Frozen vegetables, fruit or ice cream will cycle in and out of the refrigerator freezer.
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