After mowing the orchard this morning, I opened the freezer to grab a package of meat.
Hmmm! It was not rock hard.
Looking down, I saw a cardboard box that had fallen and the door would not close on the upright freezer.
I removed the box and attempted to close the door.
No go. The freezer had frosted up to the point to where the door would not close. It was shimmed out to the angle the box had held it open.
Well, I have run this play before. I emptied out the freezer until I got to the point where packages were mortared together with the frost. The mostly-frozen packages were moved to large coolers.
I positioned a 20" box fan to push air into the freezer. I have a squirrel-cage fan that is an absolute blow-torch for this use but it did not leap into my hand when I went looking for it. We have lots of box fans.
Unfortunately, I had more food than I had coolers to put it in.
I informed Mrs ERJ that hot-pockets and Halloween candy is damaged when it thaws and freezes and that I should probably eat it so it does not go to waste.
Being the wonderful woman that she is, she pretended to believe me.
God willing, in a couple of hours the freezer will be reloaded and back in commission.
And Mr. ERJ will be puffed up like a blowfish? hee hee.
ReplyDeleteOhhh, that sucks. I'd be dumping anything that wasn't frozen solid.
ReplyDeleteBe laying out the Michigan Smorgasbord.......
DeleteAlways locked our garage freezer. Son, when still in the nest pointed out garage was pretty secure, told him it wasn't that, this was just a way to make absolutely sure the door was fully closed.
ReplyDeleteOur freezer does have an 'i'm warming up!' alarm, but obviously that won't work if we lose power.
We bought from the 'zon a remote monitor, with two sensor units, one for freezer, one for 'fridge in the house. So far, very pleased with it. It did bark at use one time for the 'fridge door not fully closed.
We're a little on the heavy side when it comes to refrigeration here at Rancho Whybother, with two refrigerator/freezers and two dedicated freezers. One of the latter was a small freezer out in the barn that caught all the big and weird stuff, like the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas prime rib, as well as occasional overflow from the garage freezer. Well, that thing decided to go off to Valhalla, taking the turkey, the prime rib, and a bunch of bulk-bought and portion-repackaged bacon and flap meat with it. 'Course, I didn't know this had happened for almost a week. "IMAGINE MY SURPRISE" when I opened that thing up!!! There was WELL over $300.00 (pre-Biden) worth of meat in there.
ReplyDeleteI vowed "NEVER AGAIN!." I went online and purchased a net-enabled monitoring system made by "Sensorpush." It has an internet bridge that connects to the house wireless or wired network and as many remote, battery-operated sensors as you want to buy. The sensors will also bluetooth to your phone if you don't want to net-enable the setup. You just need phone to be occasionally close enough to the sensors to pick up what they've sampled. It's a little pricey, with the bridge costing $100.00 and each sensor costing $70.00, but if it "saves your bacon" JUST ONCE, it'll pay for itself. The sensor batteries last about a year. My setup has alerted me DOZENS of times to doors that weren't closed, ice-choked cooling coils, and even one time when THE CAT played with one of the power cords and unplugged it from the wall!!!
You can set the sensors to alert you when the device they're monitoring get too warm or too cold, the temps set by you. They monitor humidity as well. The sensors can be named so you can keep track of them on the phone app. You can have more than one internet bridge if, like me, your sensors are too far from a bridge. I have one in the house and one in the barn.
I have nothing to do with Sensorpush. I just want to put this out there to save someone the anguish of losing a bunch of meat!
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We had an upright freezer fail that was discovered after a weekend away. Large blood trail. EVERYTHING went into a big hole in the ground and was buried.
ReplyDeleteWe will not have an upright freezer ever again.
Milton
Our garage freezer s an upright. This is the one we have the most issues with. It's frost free, so once every day the compressor powers down and a heating coil comes on to melt any ice buildup on the cooling coils. That water then dribbles down and exits the freezer through a drain hole... until the drain hole freezes over. Then the water dribbles down to where it's supposed to drain out, and freezes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Before long, that ice builds up and clogs the intake vent at the bottom of the freezer. When that happens the compressor and circulating fan run all the time but do nothing to cool the freezer. That's when I get a SensorPush alert. And that's usually sometime in the wee hours of the morning, requiring me to get up, pull everything out of the lower part of the freezer, unscrew and remove the cooling coil cover, and use a hair drier to melt all that ice. I've no idea why the drain clogs. I haven't found anything in the drain or the drain tube. It's gotten to the point where I just pull the bottom drawer out of the freezer every so often to check the drain. If it's frozen over, I initiate the aforementioned exercise.
DeleteWhy did we get an upright? It's harder to "lose" stuff in them. Chest freezers often become a pile of frozen... whatever... that needs to be dug through to find that pallet of chicken thighs. That, and we really didn't have the footprint in that area for a chest freezer. For reliability and energy efficiency though, I heartily endorse chest freezers!
I just bought a "Sensor Push" gizmo. A bit pricey but send temps to my phone by the minute and beeps if out of range. Worst part? You don't want to know about the temperature fluctuations going on in your freezer.
ReplyDeleteI have no relationship with them other than I like the product.