Using dry ice to keep frozen food in freezer

I just discovered my never used, 7cu ft chest freezer isn’t cooling. This is the first time I’ve put anything in it in 4 years. All lights are on and dial went down to coldest temp, we put 4 large turkeys in it Sat evening. I went back and checked it today, Tues PM, and they were thawing, albeit slowly. I cannot get compressor to come on; make sound.

I am going to go to a store to get 10lb chunk of dry ice til I can get this figured out more.

Dry ice seller told me it would last longer the less air space it was in.
Which I took to mean: a partially frozen turkey would last longer in a cooler with the dry ice than a freezer, right?

So, theoretically, would this help? I have 2L bottles I can fill with cold water, freeze in my main freezer til frozen and then put several in this freezer with 4 turkeys, adding more as I get them frozen solid; leaving less air space in freezer?

Any other ideas? Thanks in advance for your help.

A mostly-lurker, long-time reader since 2001. Long live the dope.

Dian

You can fill up the space with almost anything. Frozen bottles is a good idea, frozen anything means you won’t be adding more heat into the interior. You can use blankets or other material to pack in the space between bottles and turkeys. You can also just buy ice. You can also blankets or other insulation around the freezer itself to prevent conduction of heat from the environment.

This does not seem right to me. Air is trivially easy to bring down to temperature. Frozen water (from your freezer) has considerably more mass, and is at a much higher temperature than dry ice. Instead of trying to cool a very small mass of air, you will now be trying to bring the temp of several 2L bottles of water down to the dry ice temp.

A physicist might be able to do the math, but I think I would go with just the turkey.

Also be aware that as the dry ice sublimates, it is going to seep out of the freezer, and you will want to make sure you have adequate ventillation in the room so that it doesn’t store potentially harmful amounts of carbon dioxide.

Right about air being really easy to cool down. It really won’t matter at all how much air there is in the container.

But, since the idea is to keep things near freezing, it will only help to put in some other frozen things, such as bottles of water or what not. Yes, the dry ice will melt a little faster as they’re cooling off the bottles of ice, but that’s OK: all the cold from the dry ice is then stored in the bottles of ice, and with the extra cold from the originally frozen bottles, everything will warm up much slower.

If it ever warms up in there enough to melt the bottles of water, rotate them with some other frozen ones.

Good point about ventilating when you’re using dry ice, too.

The common wisdom is that a lot of empty space (air) in a fridge/freezer is bad for efficiency. The reason is because every time you open the door, the cold air flows out and gets replaced by room-temperature air, which then needs to be cooled back down.

If you’re not opening and closing the door frequently, it’s not an issue. And even if you are, for a short-term solution, I would suggest that plastic bags filled with air would work pretty well, and be more efficient than bottles of frozen water.

1a] Heat energy will be conducting through the walls of the container. Once it arrives at the inside surface, then the air will convect that energy throughout the empty volume on the inside. Stuffing the contain full of most anything will stop this convection and keep things inside colder longer.

1b(i)] The wet ice and dry ice will find an equilibrium temperature, the wet ice will shed heat energy and drop temperature, the dry ice will absorb energy and sublimate, remaining the same temperature. Either the wet ice will come the the temperature of the dry ice, or the dry ice will completely sublimate and the gaseous CO[sub]2[/sub] will rise in temperature until the gas and wet ice are the same temperature. Which is all immaterial, the turkey’s fate rests entirely on the conductivity of the container. Duct tape the lid gaps and wrap it which as many layers as you can; plastic, blankets and the like … anything to stop the outside air from convecting more energy to the container.

1b(ii)] I’m wondering if that freeze has been plugged in these four years, empty. If not, you’ve ruined it. I don’t know exactly why, but these refrigeration circuits can’t just sit, they need to keep circulating or something about the something goes bad, or something. All my appliance guy said was “just don’t” …

1c] This container will be venting CO[sub]2[/sub], which is dangerous the breathe … store in a well vented area.

2] Has the turkey defrosted already? You need to probably cook it now, it’s a bad idea (although not dangerous) to re-freeze meat. Each freezing destroys a certain amount of tissue due to water expanding as it freezes, once is bad enough, twice wreaks the flesh.

A freezer circulates air. A cooler doesn’t. So that’s another good reason to use a cooler.

Some genius recently posted a video on the Internet showing his homemade air conditioner - a bucket of dry ice and a blower to blow the cool air through the room.

a swamp cooler does the same thing with liquid water instead.

ETA: A swamp cooler needs to entrain dry air to work, something the dry ice gizmo need not worry about.

Just remember that dry ice releases gas as it warms. Don’t put it in a sealed container. Bad things could happen.

Put the turkeys in the coolers and the coolers in the freezer.

The important point is that *water *isn’t poisonous.

Thanks for all the info. Its become somewhat of a science thought experiment, which is why I was asking.

When I first got this chest freezer, delivery people plugged it in, meaning power to the unit, but in a 'cooling off ’ mode. That’s how its been these years in between. So there was no compressor running all this time. I don’t see how the compressor/gizmos could have been ruined this way. It was originally plugged in because the outlet was hard to reach.

I went and got a 10lb chunk of dry ice from Gordon Food Service and placed it in the upper basket. My thinking ‘warm air rises, cold air drops’ right? Is it different if its dry ice vs ambient air?

At the same time, I used a probe the check out how far down the thawing went, since fingers doing squishy test only tell one so much. It was unfrozen only 1/2" or so, so I don’t feel too bad refreezing this amount.

I chatted online with Sears tech, our GE repair in these parts. For ‘only’ $115 they would give me estimate of how much to fix, and apply that to my repair bill.

Since I’m going to be using 1 turkey for dinner next week, I think I’ll just leave whats there now: the other 3, about 8lbs frozen veggies, and 6 2L bottles of ‘air’.

The freezer is already in my unheated storage bedroom on the N side of my home, so cool as possible.
Once I get my disability approved, I’ll decide whether to have it repaired or not. I only paid $170 for it on sale. If so, the trip charge plus a new compressor/whatever would be pretty much a wash. No sense in paying that to fix a 4yr old freezer right?
Right?

Thanks again. You folks are great. All the extra brain power and perspectives has really helped.

Dian