Freezer in damp cellar

[MattW]

Has anyone on here got a freezer in a very damp cellar? I'm thinking of putting a chest freezer in an untanked coal hole that is under the pavement. There isn't any running water but it has very high humidity, which is making me worry that it might rust so quickly that it will fail too soon as to be economic.

I know that I will need an SN grade due to the temperature levels, but what do people think - madness to even try?

 

[Feltwell]

See this recent thread Matt:-

http://periodproperty.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12450&start=15

Ours has been fine for 5 years now, and it's just a bog standard freezer, an upright in our case - no special grade. Cellars don't tend to get that cold I find.

 

[88v8]

I would not install a freezer with auto defrost (so-called 'frost free') as it will dump a lot of moisture into the air.

Ivor

 

[Feltwell]

I wouldn't bother with a frost free one anywhere. I've found them to be very unreliable and to still need defrosting. The service engineer that came out to our old freezer reckoned that they were definitely best avoided.

 

[Lime]

Neither would I.
Frost-free freezers are more expensive to buy, more expensive to run and have a smaller internal capacity compared to a similar sized ordinary freezer.
Frost-free is just another thing to go wrong.

 

[Onetap]

I wouldn't bother with a frost free one anywhere. I've found them to be very unreliable and to still need defrosting. The service engineer that came out to our old freezer reckoned that they were definitely best avoided.

NOW you tell me!

I just looked on here while waiting for the service technician to come to fix (hopefully) my very expensive and "reliable" 4-year old Liebherr frost-free job. The internal fan (frost free thingy) has stopped working for some reason. The Liebherr was a replacement for an expensive and "reliable" Bosch frost-free job that also expired after 4 or 5 years.

The annoying thing is that if I knew how to get all the plasticcy trim off, without percussive dismantling, I could fix the frost-free bit myself. The refrigerant circuit and compressor still seems to be OK.

PS They take a little moisture out of the air when the door is opened and freeze it on the evaporator. When it defrosts, the water is dumped into a tray over the hot compressor and is evaporated. So it's 'moisture neutral', really. If you re-routed the drain hose into a container, you could tip it down the drain.

 

[Feltwell]

The internal fan (frost free thingy) has stopped working for some reason.

Usually because it's full of ice behind the plasticy trim. I kid you not - frost free freezers just do not work very well, eventually they ice up.

Most of them have a heater element mounted beneath the freezer element inside, every now and then the heater element comes on and is supposed to melt the ice on the freezer element, the resulting water as you say then drains to a tray above the compressor, which is hot and evaporates the water.

They never work completely and over time ice builds up in all the places the element cannot reach, like the fan, until in the end it blocks the fan. If you're lucky it just needs defrosting, if you're unlucky the fan motor burns out.

My last frost free stopped working, and seemed a bit iced up so I got a hairdryer out and defrosted it quickly with the food wrapped in a sleeping bag - nowhere else to put the food. It worked a bit better afterwards but still not right, so I got the engineer out. He got the internal trim off completely (I only managed to loosen it a little) and the inside was completely iced up. After a thorough defrost - 48 hours! - it worked fine. The engineer said about 75% of his freezer callouts were to frosted-up frost free's, you just can't see the ice build up. If you've got one I'd give it a thorough defrost once a year, leaving it unpugged with the door open at least overnight.

 

[MattW]

Thanks for those comments about Frost Free. Any other thoughts other than the very helpful link on whether it is a good idea in hte first place? Any one tried similar and had it fail?

 

[JoceAndChris]

I've had our 10 yr old freezer ( inherited from the previous owner) in the dampest, coldest part of the building for 3 years - the sunken scullery, which sometimes pools up with water. It's absolutely fine.
Admittedly I never use it and there's just one bottle of vodka in there - don't know if that makes a difference.
I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer. Any leftovers here are immediately eaten, and I don't really agree with frozen convenience food. I've been meaning to get rid of this ugly freezer for a long time, but it won't die.

 

[Pford75]

Our 'secondary' freezer is full with meat and produce from our own land.

Once you start but herring sheep, you fill a freezer pretty quickly.

At the moment, it's apples. We do keep a number in a fruit store outbuilding, but even that is full. So we have taken to juicing/stewing the remaining apples and then freezing. We usually have enough apple juice to last until Easter

 

[Penners]

apples

Pford - We have a glut of apples, this year. We've never tried freezing them - does it work? Do you freeze them whole, or slice them , or stew them first?

And 'scuse my ignorance, but what's "but herring sheep"? :?

 

[Pford75]

Oh Penners, I can never quite deduce if it's an innocent question or a gentle dig at my typing :wink: Herring is what happens when you try to type too quickly on an iPad. I believe it involves skinning the sheep and rubbing the carcass with fish.


As for the apples, they will lose their firm consistency through freezing although you can freeze them whole. Our solution is to stew about a third, store about a third and juice about a third. We bought a decent 'industrial' juicer which takes the whole apple, unpeeled and juices it. We then add a little lemon juice and freeze in sterilized bottles.

 

[88v8]

I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer.

Our freezers, only two now since the third one died, are full with gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, blackberries, raspberries, loganberries, stewed apple (the juicing idea is also a good one, Bob Flowerdew is a practitioner), supermarket BOGOFFs, double-cooks (cook double quantity and freeze half), whole salmon (Xmas BOGOFF), the obligatory bargain pre-Xmas turkey, anything that was Reduced in Waitrose, bread, milk, and various other unidentifiables my wife has lost sight of because the labels have fallen off and her list of what's where has become too shambolic.
I did once create a spreadsheet of what was where in the freezer, but when one has things to put away, one quickly shuffles the contents of the drawers to make room, amd immediately the list is doomed. At least with the non-frost-free one had to defrost now & then, and that was the time for a stocktake... oh darling, here's that squirrel casserole we were looking for... but now with the dreaded frost-free that never happens. What to do....
At least we do have an upright where one has some chance of keeping track... an elderly lady we knew in Devon once asked us to inventory the content of her chest freezer - no baskets - in which we found meat over 15 years old... :?

The only real problem in keeping a freezer somewhere damp is that it will suffer with condensation, especially on the doors which tend to be less well insulated. AFAIK this does not interfere with its operation but eventually leads to the door panels rusting at the bottom. A good bead of sealant or some extra paint at the bottom might prevent....

Ivor

 

[Lime]

I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer.

Horses for courses.
I've just bought 10 packs of cornettos (six in a pack) and they have to go somewhere!

 

[Penners]

Oh Penners, I can never quite deduce if it's an innocent question or a gentle dig at my typing

My dear chap - would I do that?! :wink:

No, it really was a genuine question. I wondered whether it was some bucolic practice that I'd never come across.

 

[AMc]

I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer.

As others have said, meat, marked down goods at the supermarket. Sliced bread to make morning toast. A bit of ice cream if it makes it that far.
Ice for cocktails

I've recently started buying boxed frozen fish from Waitrose - it's sustainable (in so far as it can be) some can be cooked from frozen and if not then defrost in the fridge ready to be cooked. I kept finding that if I bought "fresh fish" in the supermarket it was previously frozen so I might as well do the defrosting at my convenience.

I cook almost everything "from scratch" as they say on the telly and virtually nothing processed but filling the freezer means I spend less time shopping for groceries.

 

[Lime]

I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer.

........
... an elderly lady we knew in Devon once asked us to inventory the content of her chest freezer - no baskets - in which we found meat over 15 years old... :? .....
Ivor

that reminds me of a book I read sometime ago about a university project.
The project was an investigation of the tinned meat left over in Antarctica by Scott, all of which were very old.
They opened the very large tins, collected the gases released and examined the condition of the meat etc. to see how well tins kept meat fresh.
Most meat was rather disgusting but recognisable.

Cutting a long story short..........

They left the contents of one tin in the fridge over the weekend and when they returned to the lab on Monday it had gone.
Students had entered the lab over the weekend and eaten it.

 

[Penners]

I've never understood how people get together enough food to put in a freezer.

When Mrs P is making something for a meal - say, a fish or chicken pie, she often makes two of the item at once. She says it takes almost no extra time to do two as compared with one.

Then the second one goes in the freezer (for me to raid when she's out on some nefarious activity).

 

[Penners]

They left the contents of one tin in the fridge over the weekend and when they returned to the lab on Monday it had gone.
Students had entered the lab over the weekend and eaten it.

Our son used to come home from school and, if Mrs P was out, he would invariably raid the fridge or freezer for a snack. One day he'd gone out with his pals and we found a note on the kitchen table. It read, "Mum - the orange sorbet in the freezer has gone off. It needs throwing out."

In the freezer we found that a large scoop had been taken off the top of a plastic tub of frozen carrot soup.