"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...
Doesn't everyone? As long as it's just a freezer and not a single stat
fridge/freezer they'll work just fine in a garage or shed.

Or were you perhaps hoping that we wouldn't know that?

Tim

That isn't necessarily true any more. Some freezers are designed with
refridgerants that misbehave badly if the ambient temperature drops below
some critical value which if memory serves is around 6C.

If you are unlucky and have one with the wrong sort of working fluid
intended only to work in a domestic kitchen you end up with a freezer full
of defrosted slimy and rotting food when the winter is cold but not
freezing. It happened to my brother in law. Check the ratings plate
carefully to make sure it is suited for use in a cold environment.

Apparently the recommendation if you want to install such a freezer in a
cold shed is to install a heater: how absurd to have to heat up the ambient
air for an appliance that freezes to -18 degrees to work properly :-)

We had this happen. We'd been out and picked loads of blackberries (we
brought back an incredible 18 kg in our rucksacks that day!) and my wife
froze them all. One day later in the year she went out to the freezer and
found that everything was soft and squidgy, though still very cold and not
rotten (it had been fine the day before). So rather than waste it all, she
was busy all that evening making fruit pies using every available pie dish
that we had, with the oven crammed with pies, and we then froze all of those
once the freezer was working properly having hastily moved it inside which
required reorganising the kitchen.

It's hard to find a modern freezer that can be kept outdoors where the
temperature can go below freezing, though Beko do a few. Failing that, you
need to get an old one on eBay :-)