How to make the most of the coolest fridge freezers

Look out for colour in cooling appliances next year, including Samsung Bespoke colours (trending in the US) and LG MoodUp digital changing colour fridges and freezers showcased at CNET.

In the 1980s, Irish House Rules were ranked as follows: The immersion switch was always off. From June 25 forward, we could drink only from the outside tap — remember when kids were not openly encouraged to hang out indoors? Finally, and this was still the age where recipes intoned “freezes beautifully”, we could not open the fridge or freezer without permission.

Snacks between meals spelled grubbing a wasp-bejazzled apple out of the grass.

Dedicated standalone freezers were standard in every household that could accommodate and afford one. The advantages of more cubic litres remain the same — bulk buying, batch cooking and storing cooked and sometimes fresh leftovers (herbs in ice cubes — those sort of cool influencer tricks). It also allows you to have a whopping great stand-alone fridge.

There is potential money-saving in taking your freezing habits larger, especially for bigger families and devoted foodies. The time-honoured cycle of freezing, meal planning and de-frosting we thought our mothers effortlessly incorporated into the week takes determined strategising. How does freezing suit your current way of cooking and preserving? Can you honestly spare the room?

What’s your relationship with your existing freezer — the one married to your fridge? Don’t just clean it out and reload it with cute BPA-free boxes, with a vanity pic for Instagram. Stare it down, as it is, right now. Are drawers grating over half bags of frost-burned chips? Heaving with greying, antediluvian leftovers?

Most households in Ireland bin 30% of the fresh food they buy. Hone your skills with your current capacity, otherwise, that extra freezer will be a tomb of good intentions, super-sizing your current food wastage with expensive meats and meals slipping over their best-before date.

Replacing your fridge/freezer? Consider improving the performance and ratio of freezer/fridge space with something like a French door side-by-side. Fridge/freezers have improved access, with boxes and drawers that lift up and out on tiered hinges or runners that skim the entire drawer out front to back.

Explore Samsung’s Series 8 American styles fridge/freezers with EZ-Open handles that lift slightly, breaking the vacuum seal before you pull open the freezer drawer, from €1,399, various suppliers.

Top-loaders

If you’re still intent, let’s look at access type and size. Height-wise, a traditional, top-loading, horizontal chest freezer will generally be as high as a kitchen counter (but is useless as a worktop). To get to the bottom, you will be reaching in bent double from the waist, lifting out loose baskets or heavy joints. This is physically demanding.

A 100-litre chest freezer is generally 60cm wide, while a 300-litre is 115cm plus, around the size of a double kitchen cabinet. If you routinely save say half a sheep through your butcher — the chest freezer offers maximum room. It’s unlikely to be in the kitchen. The lid will be counterbalanced on any large freezer, holding itself open. With super chests of 300l-450l, labelling, dating, meal planning and content re-shuffles are very important.

I’m not a fan of top-loading appliances, but they are easier to manage in a high-traffic area. Taller, skinnier 36cm-60cm wide top-loading chests are available — the trick here is to arrange the vertical stack of baskets every week to deliver what you need to your hand from the top one. The best deal on a 60cm manual-defrost small top-loader right now is the Essentials C95CFW20 at Currys with an external dial and one upper storage basket, at a very chill €149, https://www.currys.ie/">currys.ie.

Front-loaders

Upright, front-loading freezers are less versatile to load oddly shaped cuts of meat and boxes, but are less back-breaking to organise, taking up a smaller footprint. Divided into drawers, we’re interested in the net capacity. This is not a measurement of the volume of the cabinet (as with a chest freezer), but the total capacity in the drawers.

Small front-loaders run from 100l to 150l depending on design. An undermounted 60cm wide small freezer with 85l of net capacity, will take around five standard shopping bags of food over three drawers. Vouch for a tall larder style and you can ingest up to 250l of capacity, around 12 bags of shopping.

Beko offers Freezer Guard technology in its UFF584APW 60cm under-counter model. It has nice clear drawers, manual defrost only and can slip into a squeak of space in the garage in temperatures down to -15C. Best price €279, euronics.ie.

The Siemens IQ300 242l GS36NVIFV larder freezer at 60cm (w) x 186cm (h) has a net capacity of 182l over six drawers. You can even remove drawers and glass shelving to store a whole leg of lamb. The range is blistering in iF Design awards, €849.99, did.ie.

E and F efficiency ratings for freezers appear low, but running 24/7 at a relatively low draw, and are based on the new EU energy rating mechanism. The cost equates to 250kWh per year to keep it at a safe 18C. Let’s call that around €60 per year to run at 24c per kWh unit.

If you double the cabinet capacity, the efficiency doesn’t drop dramatically (some reviews have found efficiency is better as capacity goes up) and chest freezers tend to be cheaper to run. Together with the price of the freezer (€150/100l – €500/400l), we need to see if the loading on your power bill is really going to make a return, and that comes down to consistent good practice.

A lock on a large chest freezer might seem extreme. It’s not there to head off infant attacks on your Ice Burgers, it’s to ensure someone doesn’t help themselves to potentially hundreds of euros of meat from an unlocked garage. If you intend to keep the freezer in an unheated outbuilding, it must be engineered to survive lower ambient temperatures and will have the correct climate class and is likely to carry some accreditation like “Winter Guard”.

Modern freezers are very well insulated, so you can expect them to protect the contents during most power outages. Look up the Food Preservation rating, which in an average F-rated freezer will be 12 hours from when the electricity is cut to the unit. The only check that really matters is hands-on.

If food has started to thaw, bin it. In terms of controls, freezers are slow to react and therefore not electronic sophisticates. There is one feature you should pay attention to — fast-freeze. Falling in the door with a lot of perishables, we need to get the food to -18C as quickly as possible. Dedicated fast-freeze will protect food condition (texture and nutritional values) using either sensor technology or a manual setting on a digitised screen on the front of any good freezer.

Defrosting

The function that depresses an energy rating is frost-free technology. Frost build-up can be reduced automatically by the freezer technology gently heating the cabinet, recirculating the air and draining off extra moisture. Manual defrosting is something you should attend to with any freezer when you notice the cabinet is seizing up. The expert opinion is that (due to operator error) no dedicated freezer is truly frost-free.

Defrosting is not difficult using a front-mounted drain and a dedicated ice-scraper — it’s just a bit of a drudge. Do not buy a chest freezer without a drain position or it will have to be mopped out. Put up a schedule on your phone to ensure this chore is done at least every three to four months.

The best time to clean and defrost the freezer is obviously when the cabinet is almost empty anyway, and you can put those last bits of grub into the compartment of your fridge/freezer for a few hours.