Y’know, I’m actually tempted to put this thread to the test since we’ve been debating it for going on 9 years. I happen to have a fridge with a freezer on top sitting in my garage that we’re planning on disposing. It’s old, but it works fine - we just happened to get a good deal on a really nice garage fridge, and this one is old and beat up so we jumped on it.
I’ll see if I can convince Mr. Athena to cart it outside for a while, and put something in the freezer. I’ll have to look at the weather, though - we’re having a warm spell next week, not sure if it will be adequate for this experiment.
The answer to the freezer question is yes, they do defrost. And no, they don’t. The reason for the arguments is that fridge-freezers come in two types: those with two thermostats and those with just one shared between the two. I need hardly explain how this makes a difference.
The reason for just one thermostat is simply cost, and I’m guessing that this sort is not sold much in very cold regions because they know there will be complaints!
Thank you for mentioning something about using a ‘‘thing’’ for the thermostat. I have a huge ham and pizzas in our refrig. freezer in garage. They were not frozen, but cold and soft. I’m scared to eat them…
I remember delivering cream to a dairy one bitterly cold morning. The dairy workers were all in the chill room keeping warm: +4 degrees in there and minus 10 outside.
I had a fridge outside on a rear deck. During the winter I would hotwire the switch to the interior light to keep it on and put a 40 watt bulb in it. Never had a problem with beer freezing or the freezer section not working properly.
One problem I’ve heard of is moisture in the compressor bearings freezing up and wrecking them. Despite that I still have a freezer that spent 10 winters in an unheated garage without a problem. Of course the food freezing in the freezer was not an issue.
Keep in mind that the insulation that would keep the insides of a fridge cold versus ambient temps will also work just as well to keep the inside “warm” vs colder outside temps.
So if you were to graph the temp outside, in the unheated garage, and inside the unplugged fridge, the outside thermometer would show a pronounced night/day swing, the garage less so, and the fridge even less. It’s possible that the fridge wouldn’t actually fluctuate very much, depending on temps, and that you might need a VERY cold snap to actually freeze stuff within a fridge- enough so that the temp in the garage stays cold enough long enough for the in-fridge temp to go and stay far enough below freezing to actually freeze stuff in the fridge (BTW, beer’s freezing temp is somewhere in the mid-upper 20s, so there’s some leeway).
Also, I’m pretty sure that fridges and freezers have separate thermostats, since they have separate temp setting abilities, and that implies the ability to separately cool the two chambers.
Do the temperatures in your unheated, insulated garage get close to or below freezing for days, or is the garage attached to the house where it can get some minor heat through the walls?
We have an insulated, unheated camp in Northern PA and I’ve shown up there in the winter and items in the freezer are unfrozen and items in the fridge section are frozen. I’ve been searching for a way to keep the freezer items frozen but also need to keep the fridge items from freezing. Which led me to this site from a google search.
Cans and bottles have exploded in the fridge too many times, and people that leave things like fish or other items in the freezer where they have thawed have caused issues a few times. We try to tell everyone that anything that can spoil needs to go or get tossed before leaving, but certainly we like to leave some items there and not everyone always listens.
