I plan to make this a series with various tips the aim of them is to not only save you money but also help you live a little more environmentally friendly.
Defrost your freezer
This is something that should be done regularly and I found that once a year to be sufficient. Doing his will make your freezer work more efficiently, using less electricity and so extending the freezers lifetime. This might seem like a small saving but every little helps and it's not like this is a large job.
As a bonus it also give you more room to store your food. That permafrost can take up a lot of space. Most importantly cleaning out and putting everything back in will let you take inventory and organize what you have. This means you will have an easier time using it and you don't need to double buy things.
Taking my own advise
The best time to do this is in the winter when the food can be stored outside on a balcony without thawing. Unfortunately I don't have a balcony anymore so it will need to be stored in the attic. My attic has bad insulation and with outside temperature dropping to just one degree it lies at 3,7. Cold enough that my food wont thaw. Especially since I put it in a thermal-bag.
A good advise is to, in the days, week or month leading up to this to prioritize using the things in your freezer. Limiting the amount of things to move and store. I have been doing this for the last month and it takes a surprisingly long time. I have a tendency to cook too much stew and not enough pasta or rice to go with it so as a result I have weeks worth of chili and Stroganoff and lentil stew to go through before I can even begin on the raw ingredients. There's was also some cake but that disappeared quickly.
I had some trouble getting things to line up, mostly the weather has been relatively warm for a while and when it dropped last week I took my chance even if it means that there is more food then there could be. my thermal bag is not that big hopefully it will all fit. (spoiler alert it did not).
First step in this is turning off the freezer which is harder than I feel it should be and I ended up checking the instruction manual to make sure I had done it correctly. It was confusing since turning of the freezer also turns of the light in the fridge.
 |
| This picture is mostly for me, so I know what to do next time. |
Donning some thick gloves because cold makes my hands hurt. I emptied the freezer. Despite everything some things didn't fit and I had to get my smaller thermal-bag as well as put some things in the fridge. Those are things that I wouldn't mind if they thawed. A half empty ice-cube tray I just put in the sink. I had to move things around a bit in the bags, food in Tupperware are difficult to fit efficiently even more so since some of them were half empty.
I then carried it all up to the attic and left the freezer door open, put some plastic on the floor to protect it, fixing the runoff spout and placed a bowl to catch the meltwater. I then pulled out the trays/boxes and put them upside down in the bathtub. There is some ice in them but mostly it's to improve airflow.
13,30 I was done with the preparations and left it to melt. It was only 10 minutes later that I could hear it start dripping. There are things you can do to make this go faster. Placing a bowl of hot water in it or turning on a space-heater. I just poked at it randomly, breaking the loose bits of ice and removing them.
Remember to keep an eye on it just to make sure it isn't dripping water everywhere. I had to empty my bowl of water three times. I also noticed that there had formed a puddle on the plastic and that it had overflowed onto the floor so that got replaced by a towel.
19,30 and I finally got rid of the last Ice. Most was gone after an hour or two apart from a thick layer of solid ice at the top. I probably could have let it thaw by itself but I fear that would have taken several more hours. So I ended up pulling out chunks by hand.
Now all that's left is to dry of the water. Start the freezer and once it has cooled down some bring my food back in.
