Monday morning I went out to the garage for a bag of frozen blueberries for Rosie, and the first thing I noticed was the quiet. Our chest freezer has hummed in the corner of the garage for five years, loud enough that you stop hearing it. On Monday there was nothing. The thermometer on the garage wall read 91 at nine in the morning (it had hit 108 on Saturday afternoon), and when I lifted the lid, the blueberry bag on top was soft.
What happened
Best we can tell, it quit sometime on Saturday. Matt pulled a bag of ice out of it Friday night and remembers the hum. We spent the hottest part of the weekend inside with the garage door shut, and nobody had a reason to open the freezer until I did.
Matt checked the obvious things first. The breaker was fine, and a lamp plugged into the same outlet came right on. When he plugged the freezer back in, it clicked, hummed for a second and stopped, over and over. We bought it in 2020, and it was never built to sit in a Texas garage (more on that in another post). The one repair company I reached quoted $129 just to come out and look, on a freezer that cost us about $230 new, so we didn't book it.
What we saved
The bottom layer was in better shape than the top. Dense things packed together hold cold a long time, and the freezer had been full. Matt carried everything into the kitchen in laundry baskets, and I went through it on the island with an instant-read thermometer and a trash bag.
Our rule came from the USDA guidance on thawed food: anything that still had ice crystals in it, or read 40 degrees or below, could be refrozen, and anything warmer went in the trash. I'm a cook, not a food scientist, so if you're ever sorting your own freezer, look up the current guidance rather than going by my memory of it.
Saved: two family packs of chicken thighs that had frozen together into one solid block, three pounds of butter, a bag of pecans from last fall and a few bags of frozen vegetables wedged at the very bottom. The kitchen freezer took what it could, which wasn't much. Tuan walked across the street with a cooler, and Lisa cleared two shelves in their garage freezer for us without a second's hesitation. They're getting a plate of cookies this week, which doesn't come close.
What we threw out
Here's the list, priced from the spreadsheet at what it will cost to replace:
- Ground beef, five 1-pound flat bags: $27.45
- Boneless chicken breast, about 6 pounds: $16.74
- A 4-pound pork shoulder I'd bought on sale for the first week of school: $7.16
- Homemade chili and spaghetti sauce, four quarts: about $18.00
- Fish fillets and a bag of shrimp: $14.98
- Bacon, smoked sausage and the last hot dogs from the Fourth: $17.62
- Pork chops from a Kroger sale: $11.96
- Smoothie packs and popsicles from last week's batch: about $14.50
- Frozen fruit, corn, peas and green beans: $17.31
- Breakfast burritos and muffins left from June: about $9.60
- Bread, tortillas and shredded cheese I'd stocked up on: $16.40
- Two frozen pizzas, two tubs of ice cream, hash browns and tater tots: $25.04
- Frozen meatballs and a bag of Eli's plain chicken strips: $10.27
- The last two bags of last summer's Hatch chiles: about $3 on paper, a lot more to me
All in, about $210 of food. I keep coming back to the chili line. Those four quarts were four office-day dinners, and replacing the food is easier than replacing the Sunday afternoons that made them.
What the loss came to, and what we didn't do
Add the replacement freezer, which we bought Monday evening at Lowe's for $299 and hauled home in the back of Matt's truck, and this weekend cost us a little over $500. We didn't file an insurance claim. Our homeowners deductible is $2,500, and a freezer that wears out isn't the kind of loss we'd ever claim anyway. Policies differ a lot on this, so read your own if you're ever standing in the same spot.
The restock will show up in August's grocery numbers, and I'm not going to hide it in the spreadsheet. I'm rebuilding slowly, ground beef and chicken first and freezer meals as the weeks allow, instead of one giant trip that wrecks a single week.
Two small changes start now: an inventory list taped to the lid, so I always know what's in there and what it's worth, and a cheap thermometer hanging inside that I'll check during every Sunday reset. A freezer can die without making a sound. I'd just like to find out on day one instead of day three.
The new one is humming in the corner as I write this. I have never been so happy to hear an appliance.
