My lack of freezer knowlege gives me the chills.

August 5, 2009 6:13 PM

Buying a freezer. Any advice?

Seems like there is more to freezers than I thought. Frostless or Not. Upright or not. Different sizes. Different brands. Pros and cons of any and all of these choices. I am looking for any and all advice regarding freezers before I make the plunge. Thanks!

posted by boots77 to home & garden (12 comments total)

You waste a lot of energy on an upright. All the cold air falls out of it when you open the door. The chest ones solve this problem.
posted by odinsdream at 6:24 PM on August 5

According to a respected consumers magazine (that rhymes with shmimsoomers smeeports), your best buys are as follows:

Chest-style freezers:
Amana AQC1526AE[W] (C1) $400
Kenmore 1655[2] (C2) $400

Self-defrosting uprights:
Whirlpool EV209NBT[N] (A1) $800
Whirlpool EV161NZR[Q] (A2) $600

Don't forget the 30% energy credit as well.
posted by Biglew at 6:54 PM on August 5

I have a chest freezer that I got off freecycle (total score!) while my parents have an upright. The only problem with mine is that I tend to forget what's way down in the deep dark bottom of that thing. I've started keeping a list and I go through it every once in a while to make sure there's nothing forgotten. I think mine holds more than my parents' upright. No pesky shelves to get in the way.
posted by sugarfish at 6:56 PM on August 5

Seconding the chest recommendation. Beyond that, your needs are the real determinants. How much do you plan to store? What's the largest thing you plan to store? "Half a deer" is a common answer here, and it changes the answer dramatically. If you're just lookin for something to store extra food for a big household and how it stacks is no big deal, you'll probably do just fine with a 5 or 7-cubic foot chest freezer, and you should find them for $200-300 at Sears. If you hunt and anticipate huge amounts of, say, venison all of a sudden at certain times, you may want a larger "casket" style one that's more like 10 or 12 cubic feet and wider. I haven't priced those. I have a 5.5 cubic foot one in the basement and we can store 6 weeks* of food or so for two of us in it, tightly packed in plastic containers. If you have a much larger number of people pulling food from it or expect big deposits of food in it (e.g. hunting season), you want something bigger than that.


* - Yes, I realize that if nookuler war comes, there'll be no power and we won't last when the mob comes for us with guns. It's not a survivalist pretense, it's to concentrate work in making food.
posted by el_lupino at 7:05 PM on August 5

How much are the running costs on these? Reasonable?
posted by Lord_Pall at 7:09 PM on August 5

Nthing the chest freezer suggestion *unless* you have Short Arms, are Not Tall, or are Very Short - in which case it will be nearly impossible to get things out of the bottom of said freezer. Even with a stool. I know. I tried and nearly fell in a couple of times. Fortunately Mr dbmcd is tall with long arms, so he fishes stuff out for me now.

Also: do not (repeat: not) get anything other than a frost-free model! Any 'savings' in energy will be eaten up in loss of space for food (gradually taken up by the growing amount of frost in the freezer), and in the time it will take you to defrost it (after you finally realize that you can't even fit two chickens and loaf of bread in the thing).

That said, we have two (chest and upright) and use them for different things - and like both very much (except for the frost-free part of the upright...).
posted by dbmcd at 7:21 PM on August 5

I love my upright freezer, and I think I might regret not getting a frost-free model - I wanted to save on the monthly electricity bill, but damn, there's a lot of frost in there.

To add to dbmcd's list of reasons not to get a chest freezer: if a user ever plans on being pregnant. It would be as logistically difficult as Short Arms.
posted by Sprout the Vulgarian at 7:49 PM on August 5

We got a 7 cubic foot chest model and it's usually fairly full. Definitely get a few baskets for organization and be scrupulous about labeling. Things tend to get buried near the bottom.

If we had to do it again, I'd consider getting an upright. They're more expensive and slightly less energy efficient, but we don't open it all that often and rummaging around in the chest is sort of a pain. (Plus I hate the sound of ice scraping, so it's even worse.)
posted by electroboy at 8:28 PM on August 5

How much are the running costs on these? Reasonable?

Looks like about $20-30 per year for a new model, depending on the size.

My family used to buy 50-100 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast when it was on sale and freeze it in 5lb increments. You can also make a huge batch of chili and save leftovers instead of cooking four or five separate meals. If you're clever, the extra cost/energy will be repaid many times over.
posted by HumuloneRanger at 10:47 PM on August 5

The frost-free models require significantly more electricity to operate, but don't require defrosting.

Whether this is a good tradeoff or not depends on how often you'll open the freezer. Frost builds up because of warm wet air flowing into the freezer and causing condensation, which freezes. If you open the freezer only rarely, the frost buildup will be slow and you might only have to defrost once a year or every few years. But if you're opening it every day or few days (especially in the case of uprights), the frost buildup could get pretty obnoxious.

I don't have any hard numbers for exactly how quickly frost builds up ... I assume it would be hard to quantify, since it would depend on air temperature and humidity and a lot of other factors. But you basically have to balance the possibility of having to empty the thing and defrost periodically versus paying more on an ongoing basis.

Most people I know who have chest freezers use them to store deer meat. They're typically out in the garage, and they get filled full in the fall (assuming they get their deer), and then empty out over the course of the winter. When it's empty, it gets defrosted sometime in the summer, and then it's ready for the next fall. Nearly everybody I've ever met also uses them for other stuff, but since their primary purpose is cyclical, it's easy to work a defrost period in there. If you wanted to use it for more ongoing storage, where there wouldn't ever be a time during the year when it would be convenient to empty it out, you might want to go frost-free.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:17 AM on August 6

I've got a chest freezer, not frost-free, and the defrosting takes me maybe ten minutes a couple times a year, if that. I just pull some of the contents out and scrape the frost off the walls into a bucket with a plastic putty knife. Once in a while I need to give a chunk of ice a whack with a rubber mallet, but that's only if I've let it go too long.
posted by chazlarson at 12:25 PM on August 6

I wouldn't do a chest freezer, but then I'm short and disorganized, neither which work very well there.

I also would never buy another freezer from Sears; had a relatively new freezer (still under warranty) fail twice, lost all my food both times, and dealing with them around the repairs was the single worst customer service experience of my life. Never did get the guaranteed $100 food replacement reimbursement, either. Bastards.
posted by purenitrous at 9:07 PM on August 6