Lesson Learned About Freezers

We learned an important lesson this week…and it’s a vital one if you own a freezer stocked with expensive food. Allow me to share…

One of my kids left our upright freezer door ajar on Monday afternoon. I did not discover this unfortunate event until approximately 36 hours later on Wednesday. By this time, there was a puddle in front of the freezer, a mess on the bottom of the freezer (thawing meat…blood…ick!). I placed a thermometer into the freezer and found that the temperature was still about 40 degrees. Cold enough that the food was still safe…yet rapidly thawing.

I closed the freezer and said to myself…”WHEW! I’m sure glad I found that near disaster…now we’ll just let it refreeze and all will be fine.” Sound good? I thought so…

Unfortunately…every time I went downstairs to check the freezer, the food was not refreezing as I expected it to. I told myself that the freezer simply needed to catch back up and it might take up to 24 hours. The temp in the freezer by this point was about 30 degrees F.

By the next day, the situation had not changed. Temp still 30 and food still not refreezing. I googled and googled and found nothing about what to expect when a freezer is recovering from being left open. Finally, I called the manufacturer and spoke with a service tech.

What I was told was that we needed to manually switch the freezer into a defrost mode by turning a screw in the back of the freezer. Doing this would turn the freezer off for 30 minutes and during that time any ice that had accumulated would melt and the freezer would then be able to recover from being left open and would be ready to freeze again.

Well…we did that and decided to use that defrosting time to clean it out. We actually ended up switching it back into the manual defrost mode two more times (the freezer was off and melting for 1.5 hours total) and by the time we turned it back on it was completely defrosted and spic and span inside.

We refilled it, turned it back on, crossed our fingers and said a prayer.

Within about two hours the temp was down to about 15 degrees F and it was cranking again. At this writing, everything is rock hard again and we averted disaster.

Lesson? Freezers need help to recover from being left open. You cannot just close the door and expect them to resume freezing without defrosting all of the partially defrosted ice that accumulates when this happens. Nowhere was this information readily available, either online or in the instruction manual. It took calling and speaking with a service tech to learn about this.

File this away in your little mental filing cabinet if this ever happens to you! May save you hundreds of dollars in valuable freezer items!