For the last couple months I’ve been dealing with indecision on whether I should buy a small chest freezer for the garage. The only freezer that we have is the small space that our main fridge in the kitchen has devoted to freezing our food. We’ve been able to get by with this amount of freezer space for the last 6 years that we’ve lived in our house but have had to avoid buying all the freezer goods we would have liked since there was no place to put the stuff.
Since I’m such a big fan of Costco, I checked there a couple months ago to see what kind of freezers they have. They have one chest freezer that is $229. I was actually pleased with the price for a 7.0 cubic foot freezer but I just haven’t been able to pull the trigger on the purchase. Here are just a few of things that have gone through my mind each time I consider buying it:
-Is this really a necessity?
-Will the value I get out of it be worth the purchase price?
-Will the added energy costs be worth the benefit of having extra freezer space?
-Do I really want to devote garage space to yet another “thing”?
-Will food sit there only to be consumed by the “freezer burn” Gods?
It’s really kind of silly to put this much thought in to such a simple purchase. I mean, do I need a freezer or not? Seems pretty cut and dried. I tend to put much more thought in to purchases like this. It’s probably up for negotiation whether this is smart, or I’m just a bit odd. Unfortunately for me, this is how I live my life. :)
So, here we are. Going on 3 months trying to decide whether I really need the freezer or not. Somehow we are getting by and living our life without it. The big question is: Will our lives be complete and angels appear from the clouds if we buy this freezer? I doubt it. I suppose I’ll ultimately buy the damn freezer but who knows. I would like to have the extra space for meat, and other things that we just don’t buy in very large quantities because there is nowhere to put them. One of these days I’ll have $229 burning a hole in my pocket and I’ll do it. Until then, I guess we’ll make do.
Absolutely by the freezer. (Just make sure its a chest and not upright)
If you can find a used one – you’ll probably be OK too. Freezers are fairly reliable and can last forever.
We use it for storing lots of costco food as well as taking their meats and repackaging them into 1 lb size for various recipes.
It also comes in handy for when other items are on sale too at the grocery store. Having 2 young kinds – they love eating waffles for breakfast so when they go on sale – we can easily load up on tons of frozen waffles on but all the extra boxes in the basement freezer.
I was going to say buy the freezer but buy an upright, not a chest. :-) I’ve had both, and I find it MUCH easier to organize and find things in the upright. I know the chests are supposed to be more energy efficient but if you have it open two or three times as long looking for something the energy savings go down the drain.
Buying things on sale or in bulk is only one of the reasons we use one. In our area, the south, bugs are a real problem so I store all my flours and rices in the freezer. When my sons were at home, we needed the extra storage room on a weekly basis. Now that the kids have moved out, we will store most of the surplus from the garden in there. I’ve had my 22 cubic foot baby for at least 15 years now and I don’t know what I’d do without it.
I have a 5 cu. ft. chest freezer in my basement. It’s opened about every other day to add or remove food, and the basement is about 60 degrees year-round. I hooked up a “Kill-a-watt” power meter to its electrical supply to measure how much juice it consumes and left it doing its measurements for several weeks. At my local electric rate of 8.6 cents/kwh, the cost of its electricity was about $20/year. This is for your information, I haven’t found much like it anywhere on the web.
I second keeping things like flour in the freezer. I live in the north, and bugs in the flour are a hazard here as well.
I have a hard time believing that opening a chest freezer causes much if any extra consumption of power, unless you have a powerful fan blowing hot air into the thing while you have the hatch open while rummaging around for something. If you organize the freezer with internal bins or racks, you can quickly pull out collections of food to get at the bottom, and just as quickly put things back.
The risk to your frozen food is that of a prolonged power failure, something I’ve never had in my area, where I’ve lived for 30 years. A small generator in your yard would suffice to keep the freezer cold for days, should it come to that. A generator is probably a good device to have for other emergencies, in any case.