Cool.

:)

My freezers are level and don't dribble,, but I'm likely to drop frozen things, anyway and can appreciate the difficulties if the freezer spits them at you.

Gates is a great idea. Where did you get the grids?

Those grids look like the squares you get to put together with plastic clips and make shelves and bookcases, I have a bunch of them.

My upright freezer does have a grid like that on the bottom, but not the other shelves. My other three freezers are all chest type, I like them better. And, although the upright is level, oddly shaped packages like rolls of ground venison or beef shoulder roasts will not stack neatly and tend to "shift" and fall out at me.

That's a really good idea, kind of reminds me of my old refrigerator. The plastic shelf broke and I couldn't afford to even have it fixed, and it was so old I couldn't find the plastic shelf to replace the old one. So I installed a stretchy bungee cord, with the hooks on each end stuck into the holes that held the shelf. It actually worked better than the plastic shelf front, LOL, it held all kinds of oddly shaped bottles of stuff and just stretched to fit. Elery laughed at me the first time he saw it, then said it was actually pretty ingenious. That old fridge was still working when I sold the house, we let the buyers keep it, in spite of the sentimental value. (grin)

Annie

I use these.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Panacea-Storage-Basket-White/664746651

tigereye, I do have baskets in the upright, and milk crates in the chest freezers to keep things like those rolls of ground meat, packages of frozen blueberries, duck halves, I can put all the duck in one crate, all the berries in another, the shelled beans in one, ground meat in one, and they all go in the freezer. That way I don't have to rummage around for specific items, and the milk crates will stack, 2 deep, so if I want something from the bottom crate I just lift up the top one, It really works surprisingly well, as long as I can keep everyone else from tossing various items into the wrong baskets! I recently pulled out a small basket labeled "bacon" and found that there was two packages of bacon in the bottom under ham steaks and sausage links!

Annie

I like FridgeBinz, the clear freezer bins, to organize the cuts of meat, or vegetables, etc. When I have a lot in the freezer, I can pull out just a bin that contains, say, chicken breasts. That way I don’t have to leave the freezer door open while I rifle through the piles.

I‘m curious, when you open the grate to get something, do the contents behind it spill?

I’ve definitely had my share of things fall out of my freezer lately. One thing comes to mind: A few years back when I bought a new fridge the manual warned against overloading the lower basket because it could impede airflow. I don’t know if this is a concern or not.

Air flow is required. Not just conductivity of the existing internal contents. With reduced air flow from overcrowding, you’re going to have issues that result in reduced appliance life, and reduced ability to freeze new items for the here and now.

I had lots of plastic shoe boxes after I redid my closet. I use them to store my soups that I froze flat in zip-lock bags.

This freezer is my third. The first was a Whirlpool chest that held a huge amount of meat. It was hard for me to reach the bottom, (5ft1 inch tall), but at the time I used paper grocery sack to sort the venison. It had three baskets at the top. It lasted just over 30 years.

The second was a Frigidaire upright. It had very nice baskets and shelves, but only lasted about 8 years.

This one is a Ge garage ready upright. Nice monitor in the door front, but very poor shelf design. Bought it in 2018. we shall see how long it lasts.

Is there a difference between a freezer in the house and one in the garage? Winter temps can go to -15. Would like to put one in an unheated outdoor building.

Yes, it is supposed to be the thermostat. GE says theirs is good to 0*??? I'm not sure about -15*, but look on their web site. My old Whirlpool was manual defrost and that is supposed to be good for an area without temperature control. Of course, it was also old and all the old stuff lasts better. The Frigidaire was a self defrost, but not garage ready. I had no idea that was something to look for. The GE is self defrost, but also good to 0*'s.

The old Whirlpool spent a large part of it's life on a carport! Barely under a roof, lol.

Mine are all manual defrost, because I raise beef, pork, chickens, and my husband hunts deer. So when we store meat, we store a LOT of meat for an extended period of time. The freeze/thaw cycle of an auto defrost compromises the quality.

All four of my freezers are in unheated buildings. The biggest one is at least 25 years old and has spent its entire life in an unheated garage. The upright is about 10 years old and has also spent its entire life in an unheated building. The two newest chest freezers are 2 years old and 7 years old, same environment. I live in Northern Michigan and the temperatures can get 20 or 30 below on a regular basis and it hasn't compromised any of the freezers yet.

I also think the big old Gibson is going to far outlive the newer Frigidaires and the GE. My daughter has an old Kenmore that I got when I married her Dad in 1974, and it also spent its life in an unheated building. We did have a garage fire and had to have the rubber door seals replaced, but the freezer is still chugging along. It's not energy efficient, but it works, and so is only used when everything else is full.

Annie

Freezer design has been so poor for years. Especially freezer-on-top. My kitchen freezer, on-the-bottom, has pull out drawers. So nice to pull out and onto the counter to organize/search.

My upright has a few drawers, then I added some wire mesh bins. Full door of deep heavy duty shelves.

Good idea to 'cage it'. Looks like a re-purposed bodega wheely city shopping cart...the wheels are usually toast after a few months.

Sleevendog, don't get me started on the refrigerator/freezer in the house! I'm only talking about the just freezer only in the garage.

Annie, yes. for long term storage and quality, the manual defrost, chest freezers, and the older the better are the way to go.

My upright is a manual defrost. For anything more than pizzas, upcoming meals, ice cream, things that get used up in a month or two hence live in the side-by-side in the kitchen, the manual is the way to go. Helpful to keep an inventory list on the door. Hmm, I suppose I could use a dry-erase marker. My brother uses a chest freezer which is best for storage, but access is much easier with an upright.

We used to keep it in the garage, and I didn't like it because it took up a lot of room and it was either to cold our to hot to want to go out there. Now that we have a basement, it's part of our "overflow pantry" down there--basically just a corner of the storeroom where there happened to be an outlet.

april while it may be fine during the winter you are not thinking about the summer. The newer freezers are not as well insulated as the old ones. You would need to look at your manufactures suggested temperature range because some do very odd things with too hot or too cold surrounding temperatures. Depending on the manufacture they attempt to maintain a temperature.

Not certain what it would do for freezers but back in the olden times people raised the front of refrigerators.

dcarch, that is really cool! I need something similar to corral all my oddly shaped packages of meat!

That is why I picked the GE. It is designed, supposedly, for hot and cold.

"Garage ready - GE freezers are tested to perform from 0 degrees F to 110 degrees F"

Both of my uprights are my uprights are manual through choice. I love your idea, dcarch, and definitely need to follow your lead.

Madonna

I have a largish bottom freezer on my refrigerator, which is handy, but my workhorse freeze is out in the unheated garage, and is 61 years old! The only bad thing about it is that it is a chest, and hard for me to reach the bottom. It's quite large, being the 17 cu. footer we needed with seven kids.

DCarch, any ideas for glass shelf refrigerators? That's the one that's spitting food at me...

I have a nice chest freezer in my out building - it's manual defrost. And in my kitchen I have a refrigerator with a bottom freezer self-defrost, and an upright manual defrost. Somehow the upright's door was slightly ajar and an hour or so later when opened it there were water droplets on the top rack. Panic! It is and always seems to be full. Had emergency plan to cart all the food to the out building chest which is only full after summer/fall harvest. Well, I turned the upright off. Waited a few minutes and turned it back on. In the meantime I went online looking for a replacement upright 20 cu ft white manual defrost freezer. I don't believe they even make them anymore!!!! After the reset the upright is working fine. It is 15 years old and has a custom cabinet it fits in, in my kitchen on opposite wall than my refrigerator and there is not an option to replace it with a smaller one though it would fit but not look very nice. Looking online also, I found so many sites say they are out of stock. Have all the freezer manufacturers gone stay-at-home stoppage? I assume many freezers were sold when the panic buying started. I am quite sure that after we get a cure and a vaccine that they will appear on Craigslist, Next Door, Ebay and Freecycle, Garage Sales. A lot of people were taken aback at how little real food they have in the house and how much they depended on fast food and sit-down restaurants. And, sadly a lot of them, forced to cook, don't like to and will go back to fast food and sit-down thus freeing up those upright 20 cu ft white manual defrost freezers I may need one day.

I measured my freezer shelves and bought these baskets to organize it.

Dcarch, great idea, and really nice clip system you've devised! Wish I had the time and energy, as I sure could use something like that.

My fridge freezer has drawers on the bottom, and they are so handy. Freezer downstairs is full to the brim.

Rockypointdog, you made me laugh!

Dcarch, did you arrange a hinge on the bottom of those grills, to swing down to make a shelf when you opened them? And a string fastened from an anchor above to the top bar to keep them from falling to lower than level?

Some advantages to having a chest freezer; while one has to hold the lid up with one's (thick winter-hatted) head, the cold air doesn't all dump out on the floor the moment one opens the door.

(That "thick" refers to the hat only, not the head, in case you were wondering).

Let's start a crusade, folks: great savings potential for consumers, also our precious environment!

About 80 years ago small rubber-tired, covered wagons pulled by one horse travelled down almost all streets of most cities north of the Mexican-U.S. border, one carrying bread, another milk and a third big blocks of ice. The ice man chopped large chunks of ice off of the block and carried them into many houses to put them into wooden cabinets in the kitchens called "ice boxes", with pans in the bottom to collect the melt water.

We farm folk had a pan of cold water in the basement to try to keep perishables fresh.

About seventy years ago they started building home-sized refrigerators which quickly became popular and were bought by millions.

Many of the refrigerators built in those early years lasted for 30 or 40 years, some even longer.

While we moderns like to tell how many improvements there have been in our lives brought by a multitude of products and services in recent decades, I have this question.

I've told this story a number of times and when I say how fridges built in the early years lasted 30 - 40 years or more, and now it seems that most of them last about ten years, quite a number of listeners join the discussion, many of them saying the same three words,

"IF YOU'RE LUCKY!!".

When we consider the wondrous achievements done by engineers over the years .... we wonder whether the ones who design fridges have become hugely more stupid over those years, that modern fridges have become so short-lived!

I think that we all know the real reason: build 'em to last only a few years - and we sell more fridges: major increase in income.

Major costs of petroleum to dig ore and transport to smelters, also heavy users of energy, then add plastics, most sourced from precious petroleum, then hauled to stores and houses.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

After a few short years - haul from house to recycler, can remanufacture some parts - more precious energy needed.

And all of this petroleum used reduces the precious, multi-useful resource. We've been using it for less than 150 years, most of it within the last 100 years.

As millions in the third world progress - they'll want fridges ... and cars.

Where will we find the resources to fulfill those demands?

Without saying a word about the pollution issue, also a huge one.

We need to start a crusade, with millions of us working to shame the manufacturers into building as high quality machines as they are capable of.

Not to continue this selfish current system, that's heading for the destruction of this beautiful, wonderful planet.

None of us would deposit our bodily waste on our neighbour's doorstep (let alone in her/his front room) ...

... but in what way is this different?

Good wishes as you go about bringing your responsible tasks of this week to pass.

ole joyfuelled

Joyful, I love your thinking. I think millions of us on the planet are hoping for a complete mind re-set .....our planet is beautiful and we MUST change or we will kill ourselves off!

Look at commercial freezers, for longevity.

"Annie1992: The freeze/thaw cycle of an auto defrost compromises the quality."

I'm curious what leads people to believe that an auto-defrost freezer (either a stand-alone unit or the freezer section of a refrigerator) thaws and refreezes the food on each defrost cycle. They don't do that. I've never opened any of the units I've had during a defrost cycle and found anything thawed or the ice cubes melted.

It's the water migration/freezer burn, not actual dangerous thawing.

Amen, Ed! I'm 70 and had a hand me down fridge I then handed down last 45 years! The freezer was tiny, though.

Thank you everyone for your compliments and interesting comments.

“ plllog

----- Gates is a great idea. Where
did you get the grids?”

Amazon,

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MFCTTJI/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The gates allow good air flow.

“---DCarch, any ideas for glass shelf refrigerators? That's the one
that's spitting food at me... “

Not sure. May be you can send a picture?

“joyfulguy

Dcarch, did you arrange a hinge on the bottom of those grills,
to swing down to make a shelf when you opened them?”

I have parts ready to do those, so far have not found them to be necessary.

--------------------------

Folks, please don't start fights which is better, chest or upright. LOL!

dcarch

After putting the roast into a bag then putting it into a self-defrosting freezer, if you check it after a month or two, it'll look pretty well the same as when it went in, but after many freeze-short term thaw cycles, there'll be frost outside of the roast, and if you take it out to roast after several months there'll be a mess of frost in the bag with the roast - and much of the roast'll be quite dry, too dry to roast satisfactorily.

ole joyful