Chest freezers are extremely useful for keeping large amounts of food fresh for a long period. To keep your freezer in good condition, here are some bad habits that you need to break.
If you have a chest freezer at home, you have the privilege of keeping a larger amount of food fresh for a long time, allowing you to reduce trips to the grocery store and keep your family fed during emergencies. However, just like any other appliance, a chest freezer needs to be taken good care of to last a long time. More importantly, you don’t want it to break down and have your frozen food spoil all at once.
Thus, here are some of the bad freezer habits that you should stop doing today:
1. Overstuffing
Appliance specialists that do dryer repair and other appliance maintenance services often encounter broken appliances due to overstuffing. Storing too much food in the freezer reduces its efficiency over time. It’s because the unit has to work harder to keep the inside at a specific temperature. Moreover, food may not be adequately frozen inside the freezer because of the poor circulation, which can lead to earlier spoilage.
That said, put the right amount of food in the chest freezer at a time. Make sure there is enough space between each container to ensure proper circulation of cold air as well. To avoid having too much food to be frozen, plan your grocery trips so that you don’t buy too many freezables.
2. Not cleaning your freezer
It is recommended to defrost your chest freezer every time the ice becomes a quarter-inch thick. Regular defrosting and cleaning is crucial to keep it running smoothly, as well as to maximize the amount of space inside the unit.
An excellent suggestion to make defrosting and cleaning more manageable is to do it in between your trips to the grocery store. This way, there is less food to be maneuvered in and out of the freezer while cleaning. However, if you have a lot of food in it but have to clean it immediately, have coolers ready to keep the food frozen while they’re out of the freezer.
3. Using sharp objects to remove ice
When defrosting a fridge, wait until the ice build-up is soft enough to remove with a soft tool, like a rubber spatula. Resist the urge to use sharp objects, such as knives or metal spatulas, to remove ice in a bout of impatience. Doing this can not only harm your freezer’s lining but also put you at risk of injuries.
4. Not organizing and dating food
Organize your food inside the freezer, and don’t forget to put dates on the packages. By doing this, you can avoid losing food and leaving them in the freezer for too long. Otherwise, hundreds of dollars of frozen food may be wasted, and you may not be maximizing the available space properly. Moreover, if you leave your freezer disorganized, food can end up blocking the vents and getting buried at the bottom of the ice.
No matter how durable your freezer may seem, don’t take it for granted. If you want to keep this useful appliance running for as long as possible, kick these bad habits and replace them with proper maintenance measures.
