We went to get something out of the garage freezer for dinner…and it was open. Apparently one of our guests last night opened the freezer thinking it was a fridge…and didn’t shut it right. (It has a baby lock on the top, which would have had to be opened first…so they had to have known it was there…but then pushed it closed with the latch in the way.)
So it had been open 24 hours. 😐 Everything in the front 6″ was completely thawed and warm. Thankfully a bit farther back stuff was still cold and frozen.
Oh, you’re saying, haven’t you been through this exact scenario multiple times? Didn’t you get an alarm so it would alert you when the temperature changed? Why, yes. Yes we have. And yes, yes we did. And the alarm was installed…BUT TURNED OFF. I’m sure one of us did it but I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would’ve turned the alarm off so who knows. As soon as I turned the alarm back on it started beeping exactly as it should! GRRR.
We tossed at least $100 worth of food—sucky, but it could have been A LOT worse. And then the decisions—in quick succession:
- We need to get the coolers down and start emptying the freezer.
- We need to start cooking some of the stuff to save it (I was on the stove, Tom started the grill).
- We need to start defrosting the freezer (we might as well since it needed it and there’s really no better time). Thankfully (?) I’m well-versed in this procedure and knew it wouldn’t take long.
- And then finally…yeah…let’s just go buy a new freezer. (We’d been talking about it but obviously wanted to do it on our own terms…not this way.)
And we couldn’t really even wait until tomorrow because—as luck would have it—our street is going to be closed for two days for resurfacing so we couldn’t even get to our driveway with a freezer if we wanted to! And we have two coolers full of frozen food right now! We bought the freezer at our first house in 2003…so at 12 years old it was time. And we figured a newer one would be more efficient. Unfortunately, all the easily-available freezers today are bigger than what we currently have…which means we now get to reconfigure everything (shelving, etc.) because it’s all arranged Tetris-style to be able to fit in as much as possible and there’s no easy wiggle room for an additional 4″ of freezer…plus we now have to move the dorm fridge because it was on top of the old freezer but the new freezer is too tall.
As expected, it took under an hour to defrost the whole thing. As I said, I’m a pro at this.
Tom was back with the new freezer within a little over an hour and we had it plugged in immediately. Amazingly, it was down to temp within about an hour (!) so we loaded it up. The one good thing about a bigger freezer is that everything fit in there with room to spare. Now, we just have to not fill it up!! (Actually, we were already on a freezer-goods-purchasing-freeze so the ultimate goal is to leave the empty space so we can actually see what we have at all times.)
The one saving grace is that we got rid of the old freezer within a few hours. I posted it on a Facebook yard sale group and a friend in the neighborhood actually saw it and came and got it!