Helpful Tip Saturday!!!
Yesterday my husband and I spent 10 hours cleaning out our upright freezer. It was awful. I didn’t take a picture of it because I was so embarrassed and disgusted, but the picture below is kind of what our freezer looked like when we finally got it open. It is not a self defrosting freezer and it was full of ice and frost to the point that you couldn’t see some of the food on the shelves. We don’t use this freezer regularly. It’s not located in my kitchen. The good thing is that we didn’t lose a lot of food. We weren’t keeping a lot of food in it because it wasn’t in the most convenient place.
Frozen Freezer by magnetisch on Flickr.com
The Frugal Housewife’s tip for Helpful Tip Saturday is that if you have a freezer that you don’t go to regularly, start checking it.
Check the gasket. In our case, the gasket is worn out.
Check to make sure that the door is closing properly. The door wasn’t shutting properly and where the gasket was wearing was allowing air to get under the suction of the door. This let it start icing up. Then the ice built up and the door was frozen shut.
After you defrost it, wash it out.
Now that we’ve cleaned it out, we’ve found out that the new gasket is going to cost around $65. It’s an older model freezer and I’m not sure that it’s going to be worth fixing it. We are going to have a yard sale in a couple of months, so we may sell it as is in it. I’d really like an upright freezer. The bright spot in all of this is that at least it did not stop working and defrost on it’s own. I’d rather deal with ice than thawed, ruined food.
What we hope our freezer will look like when we get a new one or get this one fixed…
Picture by Framboise on Flickr.com
Do you have any freezer story’s or tips? Leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you!!!
Till next time,
JT Locke
The Frugal Housewife
I assign a day or two every month to defroze my freezer
Thanks for this informative tip!! Good to know. Mines hasn’t gotten to that point yet. Maybe cause it’s kinda empty..lol.
Wish I did, but I don’t have a freezer.
I love that photo (realizing it isn’t yours) of the totally frozen one, though! How do you handle that? Use hammer and chisel, explosives, or just let it thaw and make a huge, watery mess?
Actually my freezer was much worse! It actually had chunks of ice built up in front of the white frost.
We unplugged the freezer. We had some big pieces of heavy plastic that we put under the freezer. The plastic covered nearly all of the little room where it was — there is carpet in that room and I didn’t want to ruin it. We towels down right in front of the freezer on top of the plastic.
We left the door open for about an hour. Then my hubby took a hammer and sat and hit and hit and hit and hit and hit….. Well you get the picture.
He took a bucket and put the chunks of ice that he was breaking off in it. I started out taking it outside but got tired and then just filled up the bathtub with the ice. Really wish I had got a picture of that…it was unbelievable!!!
Then we put plastic tubs on the shelves and throughout the afternoon we would hear chunks starting to drop off.
It was a very long day!!! I am glad to report that the carpet did not get wet but we went through a lot of bathroom towels.