
Recently, many brands have been increasing the amount of insulation in freezers so they can still serve you when the power goes out.

Shirley Hood, Appliance Specialist at Abt Electronics and Appliances in Glenview, Illinois, agrees: Upright freezers are “great if you don’t typically freeze a lot of things,” she says. They’re much easier to keep organized and know what you have.” He recommends them for casual use and for small families. “You’re not piling up packages and losing stuff in the bottom. “Upright freezers are really nice,” says Cole Kramer, owner of the a hunting outfitter Kramer’s Kodiak Guide Service in Kodiak, Alaska. Here are the experts’ recommendations, based on your needs. “Those mechanisms can cut short the life of a freezer, so I skip them.” “Your payoff is, you never have to defrost your freezer.” If your prime interest is longevity, Greer says, avoid the additional components of a frost-free freezer. “When a refrigerator is frost-free, you’re adding components like fans that can break,” says Robert Maguire, owner of Rutland Appliances in Rutland, Vermont. But with upright freezers, you’ll be given a choice.

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(Frost is something all freezers have to deal with, and it often pops up as you introduce moisture to the freezer by opening the door.) If you opt for a chest freezer, in all likelihood it will be a manual defrost, which means you’ll have to periodically get the ice off of the freezer coils on your own. The last major choice is between frost-free or manual defrost. Besides, most freezers can hold more than you might think: Greer says she fit 300 pounds of meat in a 7.2-cubic-foot freezer and 1,000 pounds of meat in a 15-cubic-foot freezer. Bigger is harder to fill, costs more to run, and makes it harder to find things,” says Tasha Greer, a homesteader and author of Grow Your Own Spices. Budget will answer this question for many - more space typically means more money - but even if you don’t care how much you spend, think twice before buying the very largest freezer. A chest freezer is much more efficient, but it takes up more mudroom or basement real estate, and finding something inside it often involves the unpleasant prospect of digging. An upright freezer has about the same footprint as a typical refrigerator and is convenient, since everything is on shelves and you’re not bending over. The main difference is the amount of space it takes up. The first thing to do is determine which type of freezer is better for you, chest or upright. If you find yourself wanting to take that leap, we spoke with nine experts, including appliance-store owners, hunters, butchers, preppers, and homesteaders.

And that means a lot of people need more space to freeze things - as in separate, dedicated freezers. Over the past year, a lot more people have been stocking up on food and storing it away for later - a habit born out of pandemic-related scarcity.
