My garage freezer just DIED on me with 3 months of venison inside

Came home last Wednesday and noticed a puddle under the chest freezer in my garage. Opened it up and everything was half thawed - the temp was reading 45 degrees inside. I had about 80 pounds of venison from last hunting season in there plus some veggies I had frozen from my garden. The compressor was running but not making any cold air, so I think the refrigerant leaked out or something. I spent the NEXT FOUR HOURS trying to salvage what I could by running to buy bags of ice and packing it all in coolers. Ended up losing about half of the meat because it had already been too warm for too long. Has anyone else dealt with a sudden freezer failure like this? Is it worth trying to fix an old unit or should I just go buy a new one?

2 comments

2 Comments

brooke_walker2312d ago

Wait, do people actually get their freezers serviced for refrigerant leaks or is that one of those things that's basically impossible to do cost effectively? That's rough though, losing half of 80 pounds of venison hurts my soul. I had a similar thing happen with a deep freeze full of salmon I caught in Alaska, ended up cooking and canning whatever was still cold enough to save. Now I keep a temperature alarm in there that texts me if it goes above 20 degrees, cost me like 30 bucks on Amazon. Feels like a cheat code after learning the hard way.

oliver81112d ago

Garage freezers dying is like the universe testing if you really care about your food storage. Same thing happened to my buddy with a half cow he split with his brother in law. He spent all night hauling meat to my place and his mom's house and still lost a quarter of it. It's wild how we put all this work into filling a freezer but never think about the thing actually failing until it does. The temp alarm thing you mentioned is smart cause people treat freezers like they're indestructible appliances when really they're just glorified refrigerators that can crap out any day. It's the same pattern with car tires and phone backups too. We always think it won't happen to us until we're standing in a puddle of venison juice at midnight.