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Sniper-T
03-20-2012, 12:08 PM
As you all know, I ‘lost’ power to my large deep freeze, and lost a whole whack of food. These are some of the observations I made about the experience, and how it will change how I operate my freezers in the future.

I’ve always heard that if you do not open the freezer, food will stay frozen for a really long time. It was 2-1/2 days that we had above freezing temperatures, and my freezer was well on its way to being completely thawed.

I’ve always heard that the food will slowly thaw from the top down, so you may lose a few things off the top, but everything below that will be fine. This is only partially true at best. If your freezer is packed as a solid mass, with no airspaces between anything, then this might be true. But from top to bottom, anywhere that there as a gap big enough for air to transfer down, then anything touching that airspace was thawed.

Case in point, When I butchered last year’s bear, I cleared part of my freezer, and stacked all the packages in a solid mass, basically to minimize space used. As I was going through the freezer, the outside edges of the packages were thawed(ing) but all the center parts were still frozen solid.

I packed most of my deer tightly into milk crates, and had them stacked. All along the outside edge of the crate, where the spaces are in the plastic moulding, the meat was thawed, yet there were ‘lines’ of frozen meat, wherever the plastic was. And the inside portions were still frozen.

Even if you have everything packed good and tight, the stuff at the bottom still isn’t safe, even if it remains frozen/or partially. As the stuff from the top melts, and as the frost melts, all this liquid goes down to the bottom, to create a bloody, fishy, stinky soup, that all the bottom stuff lies in. While some plastic bags could be wiped off, I didn’t want to take a chance that some soup got inside.

The best result I had for staying frozen, was a cardboard box full of moose meat (coveted), that was at the bottom, and packed tight. EVERYTHING in that box was still frozen solid, even the portion that was in the soup. Sadly, It was all double wrapped in butcher paper, which ‘wicked’ enough water to ruin any thought of salvage.

Some ‘obvious’ observations:

Big masses like roasts or turkeys fared the best in non-thawing, where small items like shrimp or scallops fared poorly, regardless of location.

Non meat items fared poorly in general: perogy’s, pizzas, appetizers, fruit, veggies, etc.
Prepackaged items like chicken wings, riblets, etc, all failed completely.

Some changes I am going to make going forward…

I will place spacer blocks on the bottom of the freezer, as many as required to support the weight above. I will cover these with perforated material, to elevate everything a few inches off the bottom (create a soup basin, if you will).

I still really like the milk crates for organizing and taking things from the big freezer to the smaller house freezer, but they really did nothing to help preserve the food, so I am going to line the bottom and sides with cardboard first, pack my food into them, and cover with another piece of cardboard.

I had meat packed in every medium imaginable, from blister packs, to shrink wrap, to zip-locks, to butcher paper… depending on where I was, and who I was butchering with, determined what I did that year. I found rogue packages of this or that throughout, and the one form of packaging that continued to impress me was having the meat wrapped in saran wrap, tight and air-free, and then wrapped in butcher paper. I found a couple of steaks wrapped like this from 2006 that had zero freezer burn yet some zip-locked geese from last spring were showing signs.

I will minimize how much ‘comfort’ stuff I have (like frozen pizzas, etc), because they really won’t last long if the power is out.

I will be adding a light to the freezer, so I can tell at a glance if it is running or not.

Thoughts?

GunnerMax
03-20-2012, 12:14 PM
The light is a good idea. By the way, how big is your freezer? From the way you talk about it, it is restaurant size.

Have you ever considered drilling a drain hole in the bottom of the freezer? When the hurricanes came to FL a couple years ago, the melted ice dripped through the seal, onto the floor of our spare "shed" outside. So, on the lowest part of the floor, a hole was drilled to let the water drip outside. Same principle, but do it with the freezer, to let the fluids drip out?

Sniper-T
03-20-2012, 12:35 PM
Inside dimensions are about 7-1/2 feet x 3 feet x 3-1/2 feet deep. I don't know if that counts as restaurant size, but it holds a lot of food.

I'll have a closer look at it tonight, I left it yesterday with the soup vaccuumed out, and some vinegar sloshed around. I'll give it a thorough cleaning/disinfecting tonight, and look at that. I'm not sure if that will affect the freezer in a bad way, or if it would be moot and just fill up with crud. Nothing leaked out of mine, as I had a good 2 inches of soup in the bottom once I got everything out, it seems to be a sealed tub.

Katrina
03-20-2012, 07:22 PM
Just be careful if you decide to drill a drainage hole. Depends on how old freezer is, our chest freezer was an older model. Pop put a drain hole in bottom of inside for me and accidently ruined the freezer. If I remember, the floor of freezer cracked and splintered when loaded and frozen. That in turn caused the motor to burn out as it could never get cold enough due to the chest not being sealed. Lost everything in it. Sniper I REALLY feel for you. We didn't know until too late that it had happened as I had freezer paper lining the bottom of the chest, don't know why, it was what my mom did when I was growing up.

helomech
03-20-2012, 07:31 PM
All my chest freezers have a drain plug in them.

bacpacker
03-20-2012, 11:16 PM
Mine has a drain as well.

I really like the light idea. Our upright has a light at the bottom of it, it does help out a lot. The way our freezers are set in the basement the plug is very hard to get to, but I think a (nitelite) of some type would be very benificial. I'm gonna try and find a small LED light that uses very little juice to power it.

Sniper-T
03-21-2012, 12:53 AM
I did the final dis-infecting/cleaning tonight. this beast is at least 30 years old, works like a top (when plugged in), but has no drains. It came with the house, and when I moved in, I affixed it to a 4X8 pallet, so I could move it around with a pallet jack, as I 'detailed' my garage. It would be cumbersome to dislodge it from its pallet, and then even moreso to tear apart enough to check for coolant lines to drill hols. I will stick with my plan of elevating the bottom, to counter the slop in the future. and will also modify my methods of packaging meat, as per how I found things preserved the best.

I'm just trying to share some of my experiences here, so others might learn beyond the popular freezer/fridge misconceptions.

and streamline how I do things in the future, to minimize future losses for any reason.

:)

mollypup
03-22-2012, 06:22 PM
I'm sorry you had a freezer apocalypse Sniper-T. What awful thing to have to deal with. And because of what you went through is the reason I prefer to keep my freezer nearly empty. I look at it this way - if the power goes off for whatever reason, or the freezer malfunctions and no longer cools, then I haven't lost that much food. I have two refrigerator/freezers. If you looked into both of them you could easily fit all items in both freezers into one. Even some of the stuff I keep in the freezer can last a few days on the kitchen counter like bread. I mainly dehydrate and pressure can for long term food storage. I just don't feel like I could survive very well if I kept my freezers full of food. I guess I just don't trust the grid.

Sniper-T
03-22-2012, 10:26 PM
Molly, I am well set up with generators and fuel. If it was simply an appocolyptic failure of the grid, I could have kept them running long enough to smoke, dehydrate and can everything in them! It was the unexpected unplugging that caught me off guard.

I fancy myself mainly a carnivour, although I do like my veggies too, but I cannot fathom opening up a can of steak for the bbq.