As far as I can tell, it was only open a crack. The ice packs in the door seemed to be hard, as did the frozen dinners I opened to check, yet I’m still nervous about them for no other reason than I can’t see how it could’ve escaped unharmed (my latest check was half an hour after I closed the door all the way, and it was like that for about twelve hours).
There was some frost on the inside of the freezer, but not a lot; it was more like the frost on a window than these sheets of solid ice I see in Google Images. I used a spatula to scrape it off of the thing in the back,
I feel your horror. We lost some food earlier this summer when our spare fridge was left entirely open. It’s bacon…it’s preserved, right? sigh no, as tempting as it is you can’t eat that after sitting hours warmed up. The unopened sauerkraut in bags started right into fermenting again and those bags were juuuust on the verge of bursting. We ate that, and the refrigerator pickles as well without qualms.
I checked the frozen dinners over the course of fifty minutes after I closed the door. They seemed frozen, although some of them are steamer meals, so I couldn’t get to the sauce to see.
Sounds like you should be fine. I had similar concerns when we had a long power outage here a couple of years ago when a substation blew up (lasted about two and a half days). When the power came back on, the contents of the freezer was still frozen pretty solid and nothing in there has killed me yet! I don’t think I needed to discard anything out of the fridge section, either. If things still seem to be frozen and/or there are visible ice crystals, it should be OK.
That, OTOH, is NOT a good sign. That would call for a careful examination of everything else, especially uncooked meats and even more especially fish. I wouldn’t worry about slight thawing as long as the bulk of it is still frozen with visible ice crystals. I have taken stuff out of the freezer and put it in the fridge overnight to thaw for dinner next day, and then due to a change of plans put it back in the freezer next day still pretty much frozen. It was just fine. Anything that has completely thawed but still cold should be consumed right away or thrown out. If it has actually warmed then yeah, into the garbage.
Fortunately, I was actually between having meat in the freezer. All I really had were the dinners and the ice cream (which I obviously didn’t check deeper than the surface).
And I may have given the wrong impression; “soup” was an exaggeration. It was soft, like (maybe somewhat warm) soft serve.
Modern commercial ice cream is deceptive. It doesn’t really ‘melt’ so much as soften into a goopy foam.The thickeners are delicious, but they look really weird when the ice cream has been left out too long.
Besides the food issues, a big question to ask is, “Why did my freezer not seal completely?” Is it the door seal decaying? The door magnet not working? Too much stuff in the door, causing it to fall open?
If you’re concerned about this recurring (Ref @Gray_Ghost’s excellent line of questioning) take a cue from us here in power-failure land.
Put a few ice cubes in a ziplock bag, close it up, and put it in the freezer out of the way. Then look at them whenever you’re in the freezer for whatever usual reason.
If you open the freezer and they’re one solid block of ice, you now know they melted and refroze since you last checked; that’s bad. If they’re all still discrete cubes, they (and everything else) has stayed frozen since you last checked. And if they’re liquid or slushy now, well, you caught the failure red-handed.
This trick is especially useful for a backup or garage freezer you may not get into very often.