New one on me! Marketinmg gimmick or needed. Not so much for cold temps but for hot temps. What say you brain trust??

__________________
Forum consigliere

I am neither hot or cold on the subject.

Michigan has just the opposite problem. I wish someone made a garage refrigerator/freezer for cold climates.

We bought a new Frigidaire refrigerator for the garage about a year and a half ago. Initial intent was as a beverage cooler, but now it’s just a second fridge. It works great in the summer, but the freezer section won’t keep food frozen in the winter. We don’t really need a second fridge in the winter, since our entire garage serves as a walk-in ccooler this time of year!

__________________
"I also cook."

My regular old freezers have done fine in the garage, or shop with the Texas heat. It was the dang 'crazy ants' that got the last one. It was truly sad, it had 250-300 lbs of venison in it. I didn't find that it had failed until things had gone far south. I locked the door, and then duct taped it with several wraps top and bottom, then got it into the truck bed for the ride to the dump.

The whole staff of the county dump came out to see it, and they all wanted to know where my wife was....she was at school BTW. I wonder what they would have done if I had to open it and there she was

Garage ready sounds like a marketing ploy to me....

__________________
On the Oak Savannah

I thought that freezers in LA came preloaded with Road Kill.

__________________
NRA LIFE MEMBER

But, but, at least you had venison in your freezer SAFireman...Just think what it would have smelled like if Caje had stored some of his fish in one!!!!!!!

WuzzFuzz

Rank gator tail????? Yuck!

__________________
On the Oak Savannah

We have 2 chest freezers that were made in the '70s and are still going strong. We don't get alot of heat here but we do usually get a few 100 degree days each summer. Never noticed the food was any different.
Talking about thins smelling bad if it goes out, my father was a game warden, a trapper, a hunter and a fisherman. Between the venison, fish, raw hides and wildlife specimens it would have been a fine stench!

__________________
The best I can with what I got

We've got two freezers in our hangar that are 5 and 7 years old now. Still going strong in our AZ heat. Fingers are crossed. :-)

__________________
Paul
Salome, AZ

We have a fridge in the garage and it does not work well in St Louis winters. A real bummer but thinking about moving it to the basement.

I believe newer model refrigerator/freezers are designed not to allow the compressors to run below a certain ambient temperature (32'?), thus the compressors won't come on to keep frozen items frozen. Not a problem normally in a house but an unheated garage is another issue. A friend experienced this problem with an upright freezer in his unheated detached garage and he wound up building an insulated box enclosing the freezer with the front side hinged so he could access the door, the heat generated by the compressor running kept the temperature in the box above the cut off temp and walla, no more issues with the freezer not running in the winter temps.

Call the company and ask if they have garage heater for your model. Its a small foil heater to force the thermostat to turn on. Or go one ebay and search.

__________________
"I'm feeling MUCH better now"

In our area, all refrigerators and freezers must have the motors removed and the doors before dumping in the county landfill.

__________________
Kevin in Oregon

Refrigerator/Freezers in garages.
Most refrigerator/freezers don’t work in garages in northern climates because the refrigerator part is where the thermostat is.
That is, it only runs if the refrigerator portion gets above 36* or whatever you set it at.
Only then will some cold be pumped to the freezer.
In our attached garage, the temps will hang in the 30’s for weeks in the winter. This allows the refrigerator to not run at all but thaws/spoils the food in the freezer.
Our recent upright freezer has been working well in the garage for five years or so now just like the 30+ year old one it replaced, but it’s a single unit so that’s expected.

Whether this has any bearing on the OP’s “Garage Ready” question, I don’t know.

Yes, I know that you pump heat around rather than pumping cold.

Regards

Russ

I bought a new freezer “garage ready” for the basement didn’t know what it meant but thought it being on wheels was cool.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So they fixed so it somehow doesn’t sweat on the outside?

__________________
Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

I first ran across this a few years ago, when friends who own a summer cottage in the Adirondacks bought a new fridge. They left for a week in the fall when the temps dropped into the 40's or lower. When they returned, all the stuff in their freezer thawed. After much digging, they found that you must buy a "garage ready" fridge if you expect it to run when the indoor temps drop near freezing. Like someone earlier mentioned, you can buy a heater that attaches to the thermostat in the fridge to avoid this. Some kind of energy efficient BS. I think some manufacturers like Fridgidair realized this is stupid and stopped doing it.

Lowes makes the choice easy if you're a serial killer.

__________________
Kenny
Endeavor to persevere.

Fish ain't nothing!! Now Shrimp will twist yer socks off

__________________
Forum consigliere

I have an 15 year old chest freezer in my garage and it is 10 degrees in the garage and -13 outside today. Freezer has endured this for all of its life without a glitch. It is a cheap no-defrost Sears 10 cu. ft. I could understand if a frost-free freezer might not work correctly in this environment so my recommendation would be to go cheap with no frills??

__________________
Gary
SWCA 2515

Had a rental property that tenant left shrimp in freezer when they
moved out and electric turned out. Had to trash the refrigerator......
almost the kitchen!

In the Fall of 1957 I got a bull elk in SW Montana. Butchered it and had
Sears deliver a freezer. Put it in a shed out back. Went out a week or
so later and all the meat had spoiled. Sears replaced the freezer and paid
us the going rate per pound for beef. It gets pretty cold in the Montana
Winter and kinda hot in the Summer too, but the freezer worked fine for
a lot of years.

__________________
In Omnia Paratus

I bought a small (7cu ft) chest freezer in October for use in a unheated storage building. So far, it has worked fine, even with some freezing temps outside. I'll find out soon enough if the "garage ready" version was just a fancy way to charge more. Although it's a Hotpoint, it's probably made in china, which means it has failure built into it's design.

Back in the 80's, the AC company I worked for got a side gig killing pigeons.
They bought the largest chest freezer they could get, set it up in our unconditioned warehouse. Every morning, the Pest Bird employee would go to where they had installed the perches with poison that the birds absorbed through their feet at pigeon roosting areas and would pick up the dead pigeons, bring them back and put them in the freezer. In mid summer in Houston, some of those birds were just a bit on the gamey side.
People tended to stay away from the freezer area until after a couple of hours after it was opened.

Then late July, they found out, it was not meant to work in 100+ degree heat.
Took forever to air out the warehouse after it failed.

Weird thing about disposing of the pigeon carcasses-you could not take them to a standard dump-had to be disposed of at a toxic waste incinerator.

I guess they did not want the seagulls that hang around the dump to die after eating poisoned pigeon.

I guess that means buy fresh shrimp when possible.


WuzzFuzz

Jeez. Now I got another thing to worry about...

Mine in the barn stops working in colder temps. I was told to get one that was rated for a un-climate controlled space. I assume that means garage ready. I also didn't know that you shouldn't put window units through the wall, there are units that look like a regular window unit but vent differently

We kept an old Sears chest freezer in an unheated garage for maybe 20 years. Each winter I would rig a drop light and place it by the motor/compressor. Just the heat from the light bulb was enough to keep things running well.

Kevin

__________________
Unshared knowledge is wasted.

This was a timely thread. My wife bought a new fridge when we bought this house last fall. Old one's in the garage. Temp dropped into the 20s last night, then went to the mid 30s today.

So I checked, and sho 'nuff garage refrigerator (2012) freezer's not working. Crammed all the garage fridge frozen stuff into the main kitchen fridge freezer unit, and started lookin' for the fix.

The usual fix, as mentioned above, is to buy a heating element and install it. This guy has a different approach, essentially disabling the switch that turns on the light in the refrigerator so that the light is always on, providing enough heat to keep the freezer unit going.

How to Make a Freezer Work in an Unheated Garage Refrigerator - YouTube

Not sure which approach I'll use, but I do need a fix.

Later: I think I am gonna go with adding a heating element. Readily available on Amazon. They had a bunch that looked like they'd work for me, ranging from nearly $30 to $10. I ordered a $12 one.

Installed it today. Pretty straightforward. Apparently won't work/fit on a model that has an LED panel control in the door frame. Is for fridges with analog control dials.

We purchased a "garage" refrigerator from Sears about 8 years ago.
No complaints so far.
It is kind of small, but the theory behind it makes sense to me.

Got my beer 'fridge in my garage. It's on the far right, next to my table saw.


Don't use it so much in the winter but when the warm weather comes, it's great for keeping my beer cold.

__________________
Keep on Chooglin'