The key to cooking and shopping is not spending harder but smarter! A chest freezer can help you do that.

Difference Of Chest Freezer from Regular Freezers

But first, what is a chest freezer? Is it different from a regular freezer? Yes, it is! What is often referred to as a regular freezer is an upright one, standing vertically and with a door that opens to the front. 

Meanwhile, a chest freezer lies on the floor horizontally, and its door is lifted instead. Instead of interior shelves like those in regular freezers, a chest freezer has baskets for storing items. They are used especially in the food industry but can also be optimized at home.

Wait, if I already have a freezer in my refrigerator, do I still need a chest freezer? Isn’t that the same thing anyway? What would a whole freezer be for? To answer your questions, we listed down the key features of this type of freezer and what to look for when purchasing one.

It has many benefits, and you should consider its key features while looking for a chest freezer in your nearest appliance store!

Storage Baskets

These storage baskets are often found over the main compartment of the chest freezer, and they help organize the storage of smaller food items. You can also add packets or bags of food already open in these baskets to eliminate the risk of them falling and spilling over the freezer. 

The baskets often have wide openings, so any liquid will simply drop into the main compartment instead of collecting inside the basket. This makes cleaning more efficient. 

These baskets resemble the ones often seen in freezers with ice cream products. As demonstrated, it allows for the organization of items and easy reach for smaller packages.

Main compartment

Other than the storage baskets, you can place different items in the main compartment, which refers to the other underlying space in which many boxed or packaged items can be stacked on each other and stored. The surface is flat and smooth for easy stacking of multiple items.

Since it allows storing food in bulk sizes, you can save more on grocery expenditures because food is often cheaper when bought in larger sizes and amounts. This also helps you save in terms of time and gas due to transportation and the physical actions of purchasing food in the supermarket.

Because the main compartment has fewer limits, you can also store different shapes and sizes of items. For example, joint meat, frozen pizzas, or large boxes of cheese cannot fit inside a regular freezer. Luckily, chest freezers allow you to keep these items in your home.

Lid with counterbalance

As mentioned above, the lids of chest freezers open upwards. To allow users to leave the lid open while grabbing a bunch of items or transferring multiple packages, there is a counterbalance on the lid to keep it in place and allow the freezer to be open for longer periods.

However, some chest freezers do not have this feature so if you find this concept helpful in your household activities, be sure to check out this key feature while looking for a chest freezer.

Warning for high temperatures

When overworked, appliance units can elevate from their regular, required temperature. When this happens often, the appliance can get damaged and sometimes beyond repair. It’s important to have a way of checking for a unit’s temperature.

If you’re too busy to do so, no worries. Many chest freezers come with a mechanism warning their users when their temperature has exceeded. This is through an alarm system. By frequently checking on it and fixing it when the warning alarm goes off, you are assuring the freezer’s sustainability and usability.

Keeping frozen food colder for longer times

A key feature of chest freezers is that even in power shortages or power failures, this freezer can keep food frozen and cold for longer periods. This is because food does not thaw automatically, just like in freezers or refrigerators in a column orientation. 

Lock

Sometimes we want to make sure that nobody else touches our precious food items – may it be because of their rarity and expensiveness or because there are children in the house who may play with these items and ruin them in the process. Either way, it’s valid to want to protect what you own. If your freezer is located in the garage or easily accessible, you have all the more reason to pursue security for the freezer’s contents. 

Many chest freezers have a lock feature so that only certain people can open the freezer and get items from it. Consider this while looking for a good chest freezer.

Internal lighting

This feature is present in most chest freezers and allows the users to see most of their food items stored in the baskets and main compartments, thus resulting in the easier and faster location of things needed. It also turns on only when the lid is opened to save energy. If the lighting is LED, you save even more since it does not consume much electricity. 

This feature is especially useful while in the middle of cooking and you forget to take a certain ingredient. The dish is already cooking, so you have to act quickly to find this missing item! Internal lighting makes it easier to find important components of your culinary masterpiece.

Different size options

Chest freezers can come in different sizes to store varying amounts of products. If you own a food service business, chest freezers are especially helpful for storing large amounts of meat, ice cubes or tubes, cheeses, and other products that need to be preserved in very cold temperatures. In this case, a chest freezer of a bigger size would be helpful.

But chest freezers can also be small for home use so that you can store the popsicles and ice creams for the children, beer and cold meats for the adults, and many other ingredients for the house’s master chef-wannabe! 

Through this article, we hope you are now ready to purchase a chest freezer. It is a great investment, especially if you’re the type of person who not only needs to store a lot of food at home but also wants to act smarter rather than harder!