Your refrigerator freezer is just about the right size for some ice, some meat and some convenience items like frozen dinners or ice cream. But when you need more freezer room, you’ll want to consider purchasing a larger freezer for more cold food storage. A large freezer can help you save money, by letting you purchase some foods in larger quantities to get bulk discounts and freeze them for later. You can also cook meals ahead and freeze them for convenience. To choose the right freezer, you’ll need to figure out which model is best for you
First of all, determine which freezer model is the best for your home. There are two main models to select from: upright freezers and chest freezers. An upright freezer, sometimes called a vertical freezer, stands upright like a refrigerator and takes up less space than a larger, chest freezer. They don’t offer as much storage room, so they’re best for small families or those with very limited space.
A chest freezer looks like a large chest, and comes in various sizes, from the fairly small to those that can store hundreds of pounds of food. If you have a large family, plan to do a lot of bulk cooking, or store food for a longer period of time, a chest freezer is probably your best choice.
Chest freezers typically have one or two baskets for keeping some frozen food more easily accessible on top of the freezer, like bread or frozen vegetables, with the longer storage item best left on the bottom of the freezer and stacked. Chest freezers can suffer from poor organization, making it difficult to get things out of the bottom, while vertical freezers have everything more easy to get to by design. Some upright freezers have many different compartments, shelves and even pull-out shelves to make food retrieval fast and easy.
You’ll also want to consider whether or not you want to defrost the freezer yourself or pay a little more to get a frost-free freezer. Chest freezers have to be manually defrosted because of the high humidity level within them that’s necessary for proper freezing. This means you have to empty the entire freezer and then remove any ice build up periodically. But chest freezers typically keep food better frozen than other types of freezers, and the food will be less likely to be freezer burnt than in freezers with automatic defrost. Freezers you must defrost yourself also save you money because they use much less electricity to operate—sometimes up to 40% less.
If you choose an upright freezer you can choose between frost-free or those you must manually defrost. If you choose a frost-free freezer, you won’t have to empty the freezer because the defrosting is done regularly and automatically. But you will have higher energy costs because of the automatic defrosting, and the freezer is drier which can cause freezer burn in any food that you store in the freezer for a long period of time.
Comments
No comments.