How can a freezer be hot as hell

This is something that I have been researching for many years now. I can tell you that most of their times listed here are wrong. At least double all their times listed and on some of those add half of that to the doubling and you'd be closer; without affecting the taste.

Stored at freezer temps it will be safe indefinitely. We routinely use the 2 zip lock bag approach with zucchini bread and have found no issue with eating it up to 1 year after freezing. We do try not to wait so long, but you know large freezers. Your article, How long can you freeze food? Food can be frozen forever, but at what point is it unsafe to eat.

I have found by personal experience that results vary wildly! The best thing to remember is that if it has been stored at zero degrees or below, was in good condition when it went in your freezer and was safely defrosted and cooked.

It may or may not be nice to eat but that's another thing :. Thank you so much for this information as I have had the Chicken for at least 3 or 4 months. So this tells me it will still be good to use for Thanksgiving. Again I thank you for all your great information.

I have bookmarked this information for future reference. Thanks for taking a moment to comment, Debra. Your chicken should be fine to cook and enjoy for Thanksgiving. Happy holidays!

We appreciate your interest in the Almanac and Almanac. Happy days—. We are going to align with the US Dept of Agriculture on this one: Proper packaging helps maintain quality and prevent freezer burn. It is safe to freeze meat or poultry directly in its original packaging , however this type of wrap is permeable to air and quality may diminish over time.

For prolonged storage, overwrap these packages as you would any food for long-term storage. It is not necessary to rinse meat and poultry.

Freeze unopened vacuum packages as is. If you notice that a package has accidentally been torn or has opened while food is in the freezer, the food is still safe to use; merely overwrap or rewrap it. Skip to main content. Frozen food storage chart plus handy tips. By Catherine Boeckmann. May 17, Freeze It! Previous Next. Tags freezing storage. What do you want to read next?

How to Freeze and Dry Herbs. How to Make Pickles: Step-by-Step How to Freeze Spinach and Other Pressure Canning: Beginner's Guide Freezer burned steak for, for example, will taste tough and bland because the process of freezer burning essentially turns the meat into jerky. Freezer burned ice cream takes on a strange chewy texture like that of taffy. You could safely eat both, but— blech —only if it's for dire need of sustenance.

What can you do to stave off the onset of freezer burn? Over at wikiHow, they've put together a how-to guide to combating freezer burn. Just a question of what you do with it. A guy on the phone that sells used freezers told me that compressor has some liquid that gets thicker when temperature drops below X and compressor has to work harder. The other reason i'v read somewhere is related to compressor not maintaining stable temperature, won't turn on when needed etc.

These may be false statements and I ask for some guidance from professionals - is that the case? I understand when temp may fall below 0, you need some special freezer. But he couldn't tell about other manufacturer freezers. As i'm in the process of buying a freezer that has to work in basement, could someone chime in please?

Is Liebherr my only option? This should normally not happen unless you're living somewhere in the Arctic. I have a dedicated garage with basement that is detached from home. I still have to see what temp there is in winter. I have a Beko upright freezer that the documentation states is fine until C. Probably around half the price of a similar Liebherr.

Looks like Beko makes freezers too. Pity that they are nowhere to be found where I live. Why would you keep running the freezer when the ambient temp is freezing?

Also, get a chest freezer. They are much more efficient. Every time you open a standing freezer, the cold air "false out", since cold air is more dense than warm air. The chest freezer on the other hand will hold the cold air in place. They are more efficient in keeping the food frozen.

But they are less efficient in getting the food out of it. This is how you find 5 year old products at in the bottom of the freezer when you finally clean it up. That's an organization problem, not a freezer problem. Unfortunately, the link doesn't work - and I was looking forward to seeing how you organize a horizontal freezer vertically because I have the 'black hole' problem Sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice though, nowadays very few people have a house with a basement like that anymore, unfortunately.

I don't get it myself to be honest, it's more efficient use of the ground surface area a house occupies.

Where I live, everyone has a basement. They're probably referring to an unfinished basement vs. An unfinished basement is still adequate for storing a freezer. Unless by "unfinished" you mean one without walls or a floor. I meant the opposite. I do indeed have a very unfinished basement that gets a bit wet with a freezer. Many people won't want a freezer in their downstairs living room. At least that's how I took the comment. But "unfinished" is relative, I still have concrete floors and walls with insulation on the walls, just no sheetrock and bare rafters on the ceiling.

Yeah, you don't really want to run down to the basement every time you want some ice cubes or cream for your coffee. But that's more or less what I do. I have a not small fridge in the kitchen and an upright freezer in the basement. I find chest freezers can become something of a black hole. But the freezer downstairs was fine. Made a point of keeping it buttoned up the whole time. Dylan on Aug 10, parent prev next [—]. Is the efficiency benefit bigger than getting a different model or taping some styrofoam to the outside of the fridge?

NegativeLatency on Aug 10, root parent next [—]. Otherwise fridges and freezers would ship with thicker insulation.

KSteffensen on Aug 10, root parent next [—]. There's a tradeoff between thicker insulation and space in the freezer. Putting the fridge in the basement probably leads to you opening the door less. Dylan on Aug 10, root parent next [—]. Even degrees difference can waste a lot of watts over such a big surface, and would be difficult to perceive. What about the calories used to travel up and down the stairs by multiple family members?

Say over a month you burn enough calories to eat an extra steak to make up the energy lost, would the environment be better or worse off? What about time lost? Say you wasted an extra hour or two every fortnight just getting to and from the fridge, what if instead you had read a book or worked on your hobbies?

Would you be happier? Would your family be happier having an extra hour of time every fortnight? Would you use the same reasoning against exercising? A simple way to detect power failure induced thawing in a freezer is to store a paper cup about half full of frozen water in the freezer.

If the ice stays at the bottom of the bottle when you get back you should be all good. KMnO4 on Aug 10, root parent next [—]. I usually just put the cup upside down in a small container. If there's any melting the water will collect in the container.

Another poster said use an upside down water bottle, which sounds like an even better option. Retric on Aug 10, root parent prev next [—]. True, but easily solved by adding salt to the cup. At c salt is completely ineffective, but the cup will melt long before reaching 0c. You are correct. I've shared my personal experience above[1]. Or get a freezer alarm. I keep a bag of ice cubes in the freezer for this purpose.

It's a good trick, although there's a caveat: it only works with freezers that aren't self-defrosting. If freezers self-defrost by lowering the internal temperature, won't that spoil the food inside by lowering and raising the temp multiple times? They don't lower the internal temperature of the freezer. The frost generally forms first on the evaporator unit and that is the part that is heated periodically to remove the ice buildup.

It's possible for ice to build up elsewhere in the freezer but the air is circulated and the remaining ice generally sublimates away. This wouldn't cause your food or a bag of ice to melt, but it will cause your ice cubes to shrink over time and will freezer burn your frozen food.

In my experience, food in self-defrosting freezers doesn't outright spoil quickly enough to be a practical concern, though I'm sure it does technically allow for stuff to grow faster. What it does do, though, is get freezer burned very quickly.

Excellent trick! MatthiasWandel on Aug 10, prev next [—]. Maker of the video here. For a moment, I though this was about my video and article, but reading the comments, it's more about everyone sharing their stories. Few of the comments reflect having read the article. Fair enough, sometimes it just takes a link to give theme for a discussion.

If I've learnt anything from reading Hacker News for a few years it's that I would take this as a compliment that the article did a good in covering any aspect we might be curious about and answer any questions we might have had. For example the fact that you did the experiment with an empty and full freezer and with empty boxes vs food pretty much preempts any nit-picks you might get from people in this this thread.

Hi Matthias. I'm a long-time fan of your projects and website. Built myself a bandsaw thanks to your plans, played around with imgcomp just the other day, etc.

I saw this happen the one or two times my own blogging hit the front page. I suspect a large percentage of users simply head straight to the comments section to tell their own story.

Or, unfortunately, to find something to argue with someone else about. I read the article with interest. Thanks for taking the time. My father-in-law forever refused to buy an upright freezer because "as soon as you open the door, all the cold air falls out.

I am a fan of your site and appreciate your thoughtful writing, but I found that I could not get very far through this article on mobile and I usually read HN on mobile, not desktop. The problem is the layout. The font is small, and if you zoom in, it does not wrap. I have noticed this is the past, it's not the first time that one of your articles has been linked on Hacker News. And I always thought it was strange, because you appear to use very minimal CSS styling, that word-wrapping would not work properly "out of the box".

Looking at this page now on my laptop I see that everything is inside of a fixed width px table, so that explains it. Have you thought about changing your pages to use a more mobile-friendly setup, like a flexbox layout? I imagine now that you have hundreds of pages and years of content under your belt quite an impressive site!

For what it's worth op, I'd be happy to help script out a process for extracting your old content into a new format something like markdown so you can use whatever site generator tickles your fancy and it's one I've scripted a few times before. Feel free to drop me an email. It depends on the thermal mass of the contents, the effectiveness of the insulation, and the external ambient environmental temperature.

In real world use, it also generally depends on 1 how frequently and for how long you open it, and 2 whether it's top-loading efficient versus front-loading inefficient. Source: My venture custom designed and built a refrigeration circuit with autonomous electronic management from scratch over the last year or so, so have done numerous recent tests in this space.

I also visited about 4 different fridge factories in Guangdong and spoke to their engineers, investigated the different available chemical coolants, relevant sensors, etc. Hm did you read the article? I ask because you're just repeating things brought up in it. It's probably a web 3. From there you could do some slightly smart stuff like observe the rate of warming towards ambient when idle i.

And from there you could manipulate the thermostat's target depending on current and future predicted electricity prices.

With a load sensor attached to the tub, you could determine when a substantial volume of new material has been added and preemptively run the compressor hard for a bit. Many things are possible. Most of them not worth the complexity. Yes, given the thermal mass of a fridge any type of advanced control is probably pointless. They run the defrost timer through the thermostat, so defrost cycles are somewhat inline with fridge use.

The circuitry is simple - a defrost timer, PTC "relay", a few thermostats and the compressor. Newer fridges are a bit quieter and more efficient with inverter technology, but failure rates are way higher due to electronics failures. Well, theoretically you could just use 3-phase motors, right? I'd actually like that, and over here in Germany, most homes have a 3-phase supply in the kitchen for an electric stovetop.

Hmm not sure why a 3 phase motor would make a difference? More efficient than single-phase. In this case, it makes the inverter redundant, because the inverter's only purpose is to produce a 3-phase AC supply for the motor.

I keep a coffee mug filled with water in the freezer with a penny on top. Have you seen how long this setup takes before it'll trigger a change? Ive left glasses of frozen water to thaw and they most definitely don't thaw evenly. Someone on Aug 10, root parent prev next [—]. Are you sure that will drop the moment the water thaws? Wouldn't the pressure from the penny bias your observatios from the mug? Depending on freezer contents.

Symbiote on Aug 10, root parent next [—]. Most normal supermarkets in Europe either have upright doors more common if space is limited or open chests. The open chests are covered when the shop is closed. The budget supermarkets tend to have chests with a transparent sliding door on top.

In germany the sliding top door is standard in almost all supermarkets, ranging from ALDI to Edeka, it covers "normal" and "budget" supermarkets. The only places I see non-transparent doors is bulk supermarkets. I find it weird that his new freezer has open compartments.

Mine, and the majority a quick google search showed, have boxes with the opening on top in each compartment, you can slide out. I don't have the numbers but my intuition says that it's more energy efficient. A test with the freezer as full as possible with just water would be interesting as a best-case set of data points to compare against.

There's not much sense in keeping empty volumes of air in a refrigerated space. Mathnerd on Aug 10, parent next [—].

When there's no airflow in the refrigerator, then it takes a long time to chill food, the reverse of how a blast chiller can chill food really quickly by moving lots of air. But maybe the water chills the air to make up for this, IDK.

It would be interesting to experiment. If your power goes out long enough for your food to spoil, what will you do? Well, maybe you'll go buy some sacks of ice to throw in there until the power turns back on. Ok, if you have the space to spare, why wait for the failure to go fetch the emergency ice? Just fill the empty space with ballast water and you're ahead of the problem. Once the thermal mass is at the desired temperature, it will help bring newly introduced items to the desired temperature faster , not slower.

The only time it slows down the cooling is when first introduced a warmer temp, or when there's been a failure for long enough to let everything warm up. But note that in the failure scenarios, the thermal mass helps keep the space cool for longer than had it not been there. By the end of the last battery, the first battery will be charged. Can somebody smart give us an algorithm for a four hour flight with proper cooling and charging with the watt charger, taking the batteries no further than 50 Celsius each?

One algy for 4 hours.. Advanced Bold Text Color Upload. You need to log in before you can reply Login Register now. Scotts Offline Scotts lvl. Interesting, good find. The batteries sustained damage due to the high amperage demand of the motors.

Take a high powered LED flashlight for example. The typical PCB circuit will only allow amps before triggering the protection circuit. On an electric motor on an airplane you wouldn't want the protection circuit as flight safety would be at risk if the PCB tripped and didn't allow power to flow.

The Phantom 3 draws close to 30 amps. There are higher amperage batteries available, but typically they have a lower wattage capacity. It's a fine line you have to design for with high draw devises.