Another question related to Fort McMurray (note that my questions are pure curiosity; I am not affected and know no one who is affected). In many cases fridges and freezers are being sealed and thrown out because they are full of rotten food and are just too disgusting.
Why? I realize it would be seriously disgusting to clean something like that out and you might even need something approaching hazmat gear, but couldn’t you go wild with bleach and lysol (probably not at the same time! :eek: ) and decontaminate the fridge/freezer that way? Or does the stink just get permanently imbued into the plastic?
My only qualification to comment here is the experience of having cleaned out a freezer that lost power and sat unnoticed for a couple of weeks. It was a nasty mess, but there was no question it could be cleaned up and the freezer returned to service. It took about 20 minutes, and the freezer worked fine for many years afterwards.
I’d be skeptical of a claim that rotten food routinely renders a refrig/freezer unsalvageable.
I vaguely remember reading that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people did the same thing; sealed refrigerators closed with tape and sent them to the landfill.
As you might expect, there’s a Wikipedia article on the post-Katrina refrigerators. An uncited sentence claims that the decomposing food melted plastic and corroded metal. The Wikipedia article links to an AP article on the NBC News website on those refrigerators. People are quoted as saying that if you opened one of those refrigerators, the smell would practically knock you over.
My experience: Even an empty refrigerator, left unplugged and sitting with the door closed for some length of time (in weeks), in a moderate climate, becomes moldy and gross and stinky inside. It was cleanable, but with difficulty and it took a while for all the gross odor to go away.
It depends on how long it’s been closed up (and what it’s worth to you, I guess). But if you can drag it outside and you know what you’re doing you can go at it with a hose and some cleaning solution.
I’ll stress that you should know what you’re doing. How to peel the panels off to expose the fins (and clean the panels on their own). What not to hit with the hose, what not to scrub with a brush, what not to scrape with a screw driver, how not to bend or puncture fins, how to make sure you chemicals off the aluminum so they don’t rust. Oh, and BTW, when you first tip it towards yourself (both to move it outside and to move it back in), it’s probably going to dump water all over the floor and/or your feet, be prepared.
It can certainly be done, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re more likely to ruin it than save it. Many fridges have exposed fans and other various electrical components.
Why would one need to decontaminate the outer surfaces and compressor motor etc… I’ve used freezers as water tanks, and the inner contents don’t leak all over the outer ones. If you had all kinds of mold and bacteria growing inside, you should only need to clean and disinfect that part. I’d think disinfecting the whole thing is more of a risk management decision rather than one of necessity.
I think the main reason people would just toss a rotten freezer rather than trying to salvage it is because it simply not worth the effort. You do have to take a certain amount of time to properly scrub the inside, and get your bleach at the appropriate concentration and ensure adequate contact time in order to eliminate any dangerous pathogens.
I wouldn’t trust a 20 minute job… more like an hour of serious scrubbing, mostly around seams and corners, followed by at least a couple hours bleaching, followed by a very thorough rinse out (and that’s after the intial removal and disposal of all the nastiness within). All that takes patience, attention to detail (not re-contaminating the inner surface by touching things in the wrong order over those hours), and it either has to be done outside where you can splash and drain all that water/bleach, or very carefully inside meaning extra time and effort going towards sopping the water up with towels, wringing them out, not splashing and scrubbing as aggressively as you’d like to, not dribbling gross freezer water on the carpet as you scurry back and forth between the freezer room and bathroom where you’re draining it, and so on.
It’s do-able, fairly simple, but very tedious and time-consuming. AND I’m pretty sure insurance coverage would provide you with a few hundred or maybe a thousand bucks to simply replace the freezer and its contents anyway. So you can spend 4 hours on your hands and knees scrubbing, holding back your instinct to vomit, disposing of garbage bags full of rotten food and bleach-soaked paper towels, and end up with a used freezer… or you can cash a cheque and go shopping for a nice new one. It’s a pretty obvious choice for most.
In addition to what mmmiiikkkeee said, how many of the appliances were brand new when the wildfire hit? The value on a 10-20 year old fridge or freezer drops dramatically, and putting in hours of disgusting work to scrub out something that’s theoretically worth $250 now just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
We returned to a scuba diving shop that sat vacant and without power for two months after a hurricane. Tropical weather the whole time. The fridge sat with a box of oranges decomposing in the summer heat.
The organic matter has turned to a disgusting mess and leaked through the door seals (and who knows what other tiny gaps?) to seemingly encrust the motor below. It was not salvageable as the motor had been ruined and it was not financially feasible to repair. I vowed never again to attempt to rehab such a biohazard and instead duct tape it shut and send it to the dump as-is.
the one thing I can think of (especially if rotting meat is involved) is that some of the compounds produced from the decay of flesh (cadaverine and putrescine) can be absorbed by some of the plastic surfaces inside the fridge.
and those are smells you’ll never get out of there.
There was nothing remotely resembling oranges left after the fridge sat without power for two months in tropical heat. There was a significant amount of mold growing in the fridge and a slime of sorts that oozed out into and onto the motor.
In an early episode of mythbusters they put a dead pig inside a car and sealed it in a storage locker for months. Even the crime-scene clean-up experts couldn’t remove the smell from the car; probably because of these kinds of chemical interactions. How long it takes for that to happen will vary of course… it also depends on what type of food it is and how it’s packaged. A pack of salted vacuum-sealed bacon won’t give the same results as an unpackaged whole fish when they both thaw and sit for 3-4 weeks.
I wonder if there’s an insurance angle here … if I had the choice of a new unit paid for by insurance or working for several hours cleaning an old stinky one … well … I’d take the new unit any day.
Sometime towards the end of the last century, my house was flooded with about 6 feet of water. I was unemployed and did not have any flood insurance (I was outside the 100 year flood plain and was told by the Real Estate agent that, while I could obtain Flood Insurance, I didn’t have to get it. Yeah, I was young and stupid).
It took about 4 days for the water to recede and for me to get to my property. Almost everything I owned was lost. Being unemployed, I had plenty of time. The refrigerator was a mess. The food in it and the freezer was disgusting (although it wasn’t that different than everything else in my house). I threw the contents in the junk pile (along with everything else I had), but kept the fridge. I ended up removing the inside panels, door panels (fridge and freezer), removing the insulation and rinsing it out. I scrubbed everything down and rebuilt it. If I recall, I spent about half a day taking it apart and washing; let it dry for a few days (while I worked on other things), and another half a day putting it back together. I continued to use it as my primary refrigerator for another 15 years and it has been my garage fridge since that. Still runs. I bought it in 1988. I really need to replace the door seals on it, and it is showing some rust, but it still works.
ETA: the insurance angle. If it would have been covered by insurance, it would have been junked, no question. I am sure the insurance company would not have wanted to deal with the liability that I would get sick from anything that might have been in there. But, as it was, it was just me and I felt I did an adequate job of cleaning it out.
Especially because the insurance company often won’t pay for the time spent cleaning it; while they will pay for a replacement.
Also, this was the aftermath of a huge fire.
Overheating electrical appliances is a common cause of fires (perhaps the most common after smokers). It can cause deterioration of the insulation of the wires in the appliance, so that they fail weeks or months later. I don’t think I’d take a chance on any appliance that had been exposed to such high heat as this. Not worth the risk.