Tips for cleaning out a manual defrost chest freezer

I don't usually work on Sundays. However, this past weekend, I did tackle one chore. My chest freezer needed thawing and sorting so that we could begin filling it with garden and orchard produce for winter use. This needed doing and on Sunday I had the helpers around that I needed for sorting.

The frozen foods

• start by finding other frozen storage for frozen meat. I was able to find enough room in my other freezers for the meat that I had in the chest freezer. 
• I sort and bag freezer contents (using plastic shopping bags) as I empty the freezer. This pays off when I go to refill the freezer.
• use ice packs and ice chests for any frozen food that won't fit in existing freezers while defrosting. Ice packs can be gallon zip lock bags filled with ice cubes or those pre-filled ice packs, either the gel ones or the ones that are likely filled with treated water and are hard when frozen. We have 3 styrofoam ice chests in which our meat deliveries come packaged. I used all three to hold the contents of the freezer while defrosting. We also have several hard-pack ice packs that we pre-froze before thawing the freezer. Once filled with frozen foods, move the ice chests to the coolest part of your house while you defrost the freezer.
• no ice chests? You can also use cardboard boxes insulated with towels on the inside and with ice packs, plus quilts on the outside. They won't keep foods as cold as an ice chest, but they're better than storing foods at room temperature for a few hours.

Thawing and cleaning the freezer

• I've found that I don't need to completely thaw all of the ice in the freezer. Once the ice has begun to thaw, it will slide down the walls. I pull complete sheets of ice out of the freezer and toss them out into the garden. I use a large plastic scoop to scoop up chunks of ice and slush into a bucket, as well. By removing ice and slush from the freezer as it is thawing, I save an hour or more of thaw time, which shortens the amount of time my frozen foods will be kept outside of the chest freezer.
• Once thawed, I only wash out the inside if it has a bad smell. A solution of a tablespoon of baking soda and a pint of lukewarm water makes a good deodorizing cleaner.
• I also thoroughly dry out the exterior drain hole, using a piece of paper towel twisted into the opening and left there for about 15 minutes to absorb excess moisture. Drying out the opening allows for a tight fit of the plug.
• After throughly drying the interior of the freezer with multiple cotton rags and towels, I replace the drain plug, turn the freezer back on and shut the door. After about an hour, it's cold enough to transfer foods from the ice chests back into the freezer. Because I sorted contents into bags as I emptied the freezer, it's super easy to reload. Some people sort into plastic milk crates, which can then be stacked inside the now-clean freezer.
• I line the floor of a cleaned out chest freezer with a double layer of heavy plastic. I use a couple of large, thick plastic bags. (Mine came from 10-lb flour purchases.) If you line your freezer floor, then if a liquid item leaks badly or a container of liquid bursts as it freezes, the foods on the floor of the freezer will still be retrievable without thawing the freezer. I learned this the hard way. I put a couple of gallons of milk in the freezer. Even though I had poured off a couple of cups of milk prior to freezing, one of the plastic jugs burst and leaked about 2 cups of milk onto the floor of the freezer, completely freezing the jugs to the floor of the freezer along with several bags of frozen produce. I couldn't remove any of those foods from the freezer floor for months until it was time to defrost that freezer again. So, since that unfortunate episode, I have frozen liquids that leaked in my freezer. Since I now line my freezer floor with heavy plastic, the foods that were frozen in the liquid at the bottom of the freezer came right out, along with the heavy plastic. There was no need for me to thaw the freezer in order to retrieve those items. And, with a double layer of plastic, if some of the liquid seeps under the plastic, only one layer of plastic could become frozen to the freezer floor, meaning I could still lift the top layer off along with the food item frozen to it.

Refilling the freezer

• when you refill your freezer, don't use those handy hanging baskets (that came with the freezer and hang from the lip of the opening) in the hanging position if they keep the freezer from closing tightly. When I use the hanging baskets, ice slowly builds up along the top edge of freezer, preventing the freezer from maintaining a super tight seal. This leads to excess frost build-up at the top of the freezer walls and more frequent need to defrost the freezer. I do use one of the baskets as an organizer inside the freezer. However, I don't use it in the hanging position.

Afterward

• After several hours of refreezing, I check the temperature of the inside with a freezer thermometer. I keep our freezers at 0 degrees F. Those control dials only have MIN and MAX with a range in between, and are not exact. If the temp of the freezer isn't at zero, I adjust the settings as needed and recheck in 30 minutes or so.
• the rule of thumb for when to thaw a manual defrost freezer is once the frost has built up to 1/4 inch in thickness in any area of the freezer. Thicker frost not only takes up room, but it decreases the efficiency of the appliance, costing more in the long run to operate it. In addition, defrosting removes excess moisture, which is the culprit in freezer burn and "freezer taste". I defrost our freezers once per year, at a point in the year when we've gone through most of last year's produce harvest but before needing space for this year's. That means I'm defrosting our freezers sometime in mid-summer.

I don't thaw all of the manual freezer space at one time. Next week, we'll tackle the other manual defrost freezer. 

The entire process took about 6 hours yesterday. The defrost phase took about 5 hours with me periodically checking on the ice layer and removing what ice and slush I could. It took 5 to 10 minutes to thoroughly dry the interior with rags, and about 45 minutes in the operating mode to drop the temperature low enough that the freezer was colder than the inside of the ice chests.

Were there any surprises? We found more frozen chicken than I knew about, as well as a couple of donuts, half of a Danish pastry, a half carton of rainbow sherbet, lots of bread scraps and burger/hot dog buns, three pounds of butter, and some pecan halves. I'll be making something with the bread scraps later this week, and the donuts and Danish are already gone. It's nice to have more chicken than I thought, too. The biggest benefit, though, is we now know what we have and how much.