"Do you want to add the three-year protection plan for $59?"
The young man at Lowe's had a scanner in one hand and a dolly in the other, and I said no before he'd quite finished the sentence. Matt gave me a look that meant we'd talk about it in the truck. We did, and I still think it was the right call for us, but it deserves more than the two seconds I gave it. So here's how we picked a new chest freezer two weeks ago, in a hurry, after the old one died in a 108-degree garage.
What "garage-ready" means
After the old freezer died, I dug its manual out of the junk drawer, and there it was in the specifications: it was meant to run in a room between about 55 and 90 degrees. Our garage passes 90 by lunchtime from June through September and hit 108 the weekend the freezer quit. We ran that freezer outside its rating for five Texas summers, and it lasted about as long as you'd expect.
A garage-ready freezer is built to keep running across a much wider range of temperatures. The one we bought is rated on its tag for garages from 0 to 110 degrees. That doesn't make it immune to a Dallas August, but it was designed for exactly where we put it. The ratings vary by brand and model, so I read the tag on every one we looked at instead of trusting the sign on the shelf.
What we looked at and what we paid
We needed one that day. Half our surviving food was in the Nguyens' garage freezer across the street, and I didn't want to impose for more than a night. So this was not a careful month of research. I checked two other stores' websites from the parking lot while Matt walked the aisle, and here's what was in stock that afternoon:
- A 5.0 cubic foot chest freezer for about $199, not garage-rated
- The 7.0 cubic foot garage-ready chest freezer we bought, $299
- A 10 cubic foot garage-ready model for about $449
- Upright garage-ready freezers starting around $650
The 7.0 is close to the size of our old one, so it fit the same spot, and it holds what a family of five actually keeps: a few weeks of meat, freezer meals, smoothie packs and, as of last Saturday, ten pounds of Hatch chiles. The upright would have made things easier to find, but not $350 easier.
Matt and a Lowe's employee loaded it upright into the bed of the F-150 and strapped it down. At home it sat for a few hours before we plugged it in, because the manual asked for that, and then it ran empty overnight. Our food came home from the Nguyens' the next evening, still frozen solid.
The warranty we skipped
Here's what Matt and I talked through in the truck:
- The plan was about 20 percent of the price of the freezer.
- The freezer comes with the manufacturer's warranty for the first year anyway.
- Our old freezer died at five years. A three-year plan wouldn't have covered that failure.
- A chest freezer is about the simplest appliance in the house: an insulated box, a compressor and a thermostat.
The expensive part of the last failure wasn't the freezer. It was about $210 of food. So instead of buying the plan, I made a line in the spreadsheet called "freezer fund" and put $59 in it, and I'm spending attention instead of money. A $4 thermometer hangs from the basket. During every Sunday reset I check it and listen for the hum. The inventory list taped to the lid gets updated as things go in and out.
That was our call, for a $299 appliance, with our budget and our garage. Plans differ in what they cover, and someone else's situation could easily tip the other way. If you're weighing one, read the actual terms before you're standing at the register with a scanner pointed at you.
What it costs to run
I still have the Kill A Watt meter from my June experiment, so the new freezer spent its first week plugged into it. With the garage running in the high 90s, it used about 0.9 kWh a day. At our current rate of about 15.4 cents, that's roughly 14 cents a day, or about $4.20 a month. I'm curious to see what it does in January, when the garage is cold and the freezer barely has to try.
This morning the thermometer on the basket read 2 below zero. The one on the garage wall read 96. Both numbers are exactly where I want them.
