You missed the perhaps most important datapoint: how often and many times did you open the freezer? Side loaded freezer and fridges are extremely inefficient because all the cold air is let out when you open the door.
This is also why it's important to FILL the freezer as much as possible if you know you might lose power.
We lost power for 4 days, but I packed in every water bottle I could find before hand, and everything remained frozen for the entire period. Literally almost no space left for air.
Careful with that, it can be a massive headache when you want to try and get them back out again if you make the mistake of letting them freeze around something to where it's now stuck in place.
Yea so a few things he pointed out in this write up were readily observable. For example, the air falling out of the freezer is actually quite visible when hitting a hot humid ambient air. Also you could see the rate of defrosting accelerate everytime you opened the door.
By the time we were able to find a gas station with dry ice we were out looking for open wal marts at a 73 mile radius from the house (Columbus Texas). The dry ice was not significant enough to do much more than get the fish cool. It was too late.
Interesting point I'd never considered until this thread...
Why not tip the freezer / fridge onto its back? So that doors open "up"?
Aware they're typically not perfectly flat on the rear face, but close enough you could support it with minimal work. And if it's unpowered, there's no need for clearance back there.
On the one hand that would assist with the immediate problem but might cause another problem down the line.
Most small refrigerated appliances use hermetically sealed compressors and you’re actually supposed to wait a bit 24hrs ish before starting them to allow the oil in the system to drain back to where it belongs. So theoretically after the power came back on and you flip it back upright you should wait to turn it back on. In reality, lots of people move freezers and fridges and window a/c units and plug them back in and use them right away with no problem. But it is possible that you might severely shorten the life of your equipment too.
But the heat capacity of the air inside is negligible compared to that of the solid stuff inside. So it shouldn’t matter if you do it just a few times in two weeks.
I always imagined that the air and its thermal mass was insignificant compared to the ice cubes and frozen steaks and frozen pizzas. The mass of the air must be less than 1% of all those things, no?
