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If you need extra freezer space for long-term frozen food storage, you need a deep freezer, aka chest freezer. These freezers open from the top and even smaller units give you a lot of space for storage. A deep freezer will not work well for your main freezer where you want foods to be easily accessible, but for stocking up and extended freezing, they are the best solution. But there’s a problem. An attractive solution to this problem is buying a unit with auto-defrost. In this article, I will explain why that is not a good idea.
Defrosting the Freezer – A Family Event
You may be thinking, I have a big freezer. I can stock it up and keep food for years. It’s a freezer! As I explained here, modern freezers are not very good for long-term storage. They are prone to causing freezer burn and of changes in your frozen food because of the freeze-thaw cycle.
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If you are old enough to remember the days before auto-defrost, you may have seen or even helped your parents thaw out the freezer in your house. Old freezers would frost up and if they were left neglected, the layer of frost on the surfaces of the freezer would get thicker and thicker. I’ve seen small top-mounted freezers with so much frost there was only a tiny space big enough to fit a lone popsicle!
To defrost your freezer, you had to take all the food out and turn off the freezer, allowing all the ice to melt. And you had to sop up all the water that was left. If your freezer was large and this took a long time, the food would thaw, meaning you had to make sure to use all or most of it before you defrosted the freezer. It was a big chore and a huge pain in the butt and often became a family affair with everybody pitching in.
We would chip out the ice however we could. We would speed up the defrosting with warm water. And I already mentioned the blow dryer, which, in hindsight, was probably not very safe. But, you did anything you could to speed up the melting of the frost, and sometimes plain old ice.
Deep freezers had the same problem. And since we stored large amounts of food in them, it was even tougher to plan for a defrost. However, since they were big boxes with a hinged lid on top, they at least had a drain plug to let out all the water after all the ice melted. I remember dumping warm water in and using a blow dryer to speed up the ice melting in my grandmother’s huge deep freezer unit.
Today, you can get deep chest freezers with auto defrost. But, a lack of auto-defrost is the main advantage of a chest-style long-term freezer unit. It is what allows you to store frozen foods for very extended periods of time without any appreciable change in the food at all, as long as you aren’t constantly opening and closing it while adding warm foods to it.
The Problem with Auto-Defrost
Auto-Defrost isn’t magic. It’s not a technology that keeps ice from forming in your freezer. All the automatic defrost feature in your freezer does is turn your freezer on and off. It does exactly what you would do manually, only for shorter periods and much more often. Older freezers just stayed on all the time.
During the off phase of an on-off cycle, your freezer may allow its inside to reach up to a balmy 50° F! That’s why your ice cream is mysteriously soft sometimes. When this happens, you can bet that some of your food is beginning to thaw, not just the ice cream. And then, the freezer cools down and the food re-freezes. This happens over and over again.
This thawing and refreezing cycle causes freezer burn and other undesirable changes in your food. Food that should be frozen separately inside a package will end up clumped together, for example. This means that frozen berries, beans, and other foods will embedded in a big solid chunk of ice. When the food thaws, it gives off water that freezes around the food once the temperature drops again.
So, if you don’t want all this happening, you don’t want auto-defrost. Since the reason to have a chest freezer is to keep food longer, auto-defrost can defeat the purpose of owning one. Another source of warming and thawing is opening the door of the freezer. So it’s best to use a deep chest freezer for food items you don’t need access to all the time.
Placement Of Your Deep-Chest Freezer, Another Advantage
Your combo refrigerator-freezer unit probably has an Achilles heel: Room temperature. If you try to keep it in an uninsulated and unheated space, it will not work. In other words, you can’t keep your refrigerator/freezer on your back porch if it gets very cold in the winter where you live. The freezer will not do well in the cold.
We had a terrible cold snap one year and the furnace was down during the entire two-week period. The house was, at times, 40° F all day long. That’s enough to get hypothermia if you can’t warm up. Guess what also happened? The food in my freezer thawed. The freezer could not operate properly at temperatures below 50° F. It also wouldn’t operate properly in very hot environments. Typically, the ambient temperature operating range of a freezer is between 60° F to 95° F
The problem is that once the temperature gauge drops below 60° F, the compressor will not run as often and may stop running altogether. The main temperature sensor is often in the refrigerator compartment and it just thinks things are hunky-dory when the room gets cold, shutting off the freezer compressor. A 50° F house may be chilly to you, but to your food, it’s an opportunity to thaw.
It is possible to purchase garage-ready units that can operate at much wider room-temperature ranges, but they cost a pretty penny. Otherwise, you can’t keep your auto-defrost combination refrigerator-freezer unit in the garage unless it’s heated and insulated. You certainly can’t keep it outside. Well, you can. It just won’t work well.
A deep chest freezer without auto-defrost will usually not have this problem. They will not operate very well in direct sunlight and scorching heat (it’s a freezer, not a magician), but they won’t stop running in the cold. While the freezer manufacturer will not advise you to keep your freezer outside because of direct sunlight and exposure to rust-causing water, they also won’t tell you to keep it in a warm room. You can keep your deep freezer in the garage, usually, with no problem. Since a garage, storage room, or basement is the location most people will choose, this is another win for the deep freezer.
I don’t have to tell you not to buy a deep freezer with auto-defrost if you’ve read this far. But don’t worry, you’re not going to accidentally purchase one! Most will not have this feature and if they do, you’ll notice it in the price difference. Chances are, you won’t even come across a unit with auto-defrost while shopping for one, although they do exist. That’s not the point. Many people, especially people my age, may be thinking they need a deep freezer with automatic defrosting capabilities and either fail to find one or do not opt to purchase a deep freezer because they can’t find one. Now you know that this feature is not a good one to have in a deep chest freezer meant for longer-term storage.
