"Bob Minchin" wrote in message
news
Maurice wrote:
Just had Indesit/Hotpoint engineer to mend a 6-month-old fridge freezer
that had stopped working.

He checked that it did work if power connected directly to compressor,
and then advised me that it wasn't designed to work if ambient temp
10oC, adding "But they don't tell you that when buying"!

Considering the target temp for a freezer is -18oC, it seems an odd
deign point, even though this one is in a garage whose ambient temp was
around 5oc.

He said he would order a new freezer thermostat (as "it didn't seem to
be working properly") and return to replace it.

[The previous fridge/freezer had been working for years in same
garage.]

Quite normal and widely known since they started compromising on the
design of fridge freezers and fitting single compressors.

Maybe widely know in the trade, but I doubt whether many lay people would be
aware of it. Given that for years people have kept chest freezers in an
outhouse/garage, you tend to think that all freezers are capable of
withstanding below freezing temperatures. You'd think that higher than
normal temps (eg during a heatwave) might stress the parts more heavily in
that the compressor would have to work for longer with fewer breaks once the
freezer is cold enough.

I remember for years my parents kept their freezer in an unheated
conservatory (ie it only got heat from the adjacent kitchen). Twice a year
we'd have the moving-of-the-freezer ceremony, to move it to the garage in
summer when the conservatory got very hot and then back to the conservatory
in winter - but the winter move was more because that's when it was more of
a chore to go out into the cold and rain to walk right round to the garage,
rather than because we thought the freezer wouldn't work "outside" in
winter. This was in the 1970s and 80s, so the freezer may well have been
winter-proof anyway.

When my wife mentioned the problem to her dad who is an electrician and
therefore used to electrical appliances, even he didn't know about it. Maybe
he'd never checked the specs of new freezers that he'd installed for
customers when he'd had to install power to a shed etc.


Now you mention it, I think it's mostly a problem with combined
fridge/freezers rather than freezers with no fridge. Quite why a single
compressor would be a problem, I don't know, unless the changeover valve to
direct coolant to fridge/freezer/fridge-and-freezer and/or the thermostats
can't cope with cold temps.

It does seem perverse, until you investigate the root cause, that a device
designed to keep the interior down to -18 deg C can't cope when the outside
temp is almost as cold as that sort of temp :-)

I did hear someone suggest that if you have such a device, you should take
the produce out and put the baskets in the outhouse at ambient temp, and
turn the freezer off, when the outside temp gets very cold :-) Sadly
there's a band of temp between freezer temp (-18) and the coldest that the
device can withstand (maybe -5 deg C), so food may well not be frozen as
deeply as if needs to last for several months.


I've just remembered that we had problems at our holiday cottage which is
heated in winter only to frost-free temperatures, and the fridge/freezer is
in a lean-to building which also houses the boiler, but with no radiator so
is only heated by "escaped" heat from the boiler and through the door from
the heated kitchen into the lean-to. We'd spent Christmas there, so the
house had been heated, and we left some extra things in the freezer, meaning
to go back and take them home when we went back later in January, because we
couldn't fit everything in the cool-box in the car. When we went back a few
weeks after Christmas, when temps had probably been around -5 to 0 deg C, we
found that the contents of the freezer were a bit soft, so we had to ditch
the meat/fish (including a whole salmon that we'd bought at very cheap
pre-Christmas prices) just in case, but other things were OK once we managed
to persuade the freezer to start cooling properly - by leaving open the
inside door between the kitchen and freezer room :-)

It's now part of our "winterising the cottage" checklist: leave the inside
door open if leaving the fridge/freezer on, so the room stays at frost-free
temp. Putting the fridge/freezer in the kitchen is not an option because the
kitchen is titchy and has no room for a full-height appliance. Hence it is
kept in the new brick porch and utility room that is outside what was
originally the outside door of the cottage leading into the kitchen.


I'd say that if a freezer can't be used outside or in an unheated house, it
needs a VERY prominent warning both on the appliance and in the sales
literature, and all salesmen need to be trained to check suitability with
the customer. Such appliances are *almost* into chocolate teapot territory
of unsuitability for purpose :-)