Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Need a deep freezer...

What brands are good?

What should I look for?

Upright or chest?

Ready go!!!

upright is the only way to go.

chest will have you digging stuff out the bottom 5 yrs from now you have forgotten about.....

I like chest freezers.

I read a bit ago that most are made by the same couple factories, just rebranded. I have one from Costco that was pretty cheap. Small 7 or 9 CF model. Manual defrost. Not a big deal every couple years. The second is a larger freezer I bought at a yard sale. 15+ CF. It’s probably 30-40years old and works great. I’d bet it outlasts the new one.

Uprights are great, but you’ll still bury things, harder to use all the space, and schit falls out when you open the door. A couple milk crates in a chest freezer help keep it organized and easy to access things.

Biggest upright they make and frost free as well you won't regret it.

I'm a fan of chest freezers. No idea what brand ours is but have had it for 20 years and it works great. One recomendation is to freeze a 5 gallon bucket or two of ice to have a thermal mass when your freezing large quantities of meat. I also make 50# blocks of ice in a 50# sausage tote for my large coolers.

Last freezer I bought was an upright Sears/Kenmore.


22 cu.ft I believe.

And NOT frost free. Those things are garbage.

About a year ago, replaced my chest freezer with an upright, defrosting frigidaire. Can't remember how big it is but holds a whole processed elk, 2 processed deer and a bunch of other game (ducks, grouse, fish). Dang nice. So glad I don't have to bend over and dig anymore.

This is the one we have and has worked well.
Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowes (I think) were all just rebadged units of the same mfg.

Our chest freezer works fine if you don't have everybody in the house digging thru it - messing chit up.

The milk crate idea sounds like a winner though.

Chest freezers are more efficient.The cold air doens't fall out the door when you open the lid like an up right does. I like them.It is easy to separate food using those big Ziplock bags after the food is packaged.

Manual Defrost type will keep your food longer with out freezer burn.

Buy bigger than what you think you will need. It's always nice to be able to freeze gallon jugs of ice to take a long on warm hunting trips to keep meat cool

I have three freezers.Two are 4ft chest and one upright.One chest freezer is a General Electric.It's 50yrs old,yes 50yrs old.Still works as good as it did when it was new. The other chest is a Frigidaire,I've had it for about 15yrs and it works great too.My wife made a bunch of cloth bags about the size of a big paper grocery bag.She also put different colored handles on them so you can store like foods by colored handles.The recycled grocery bags they sell in the stores would work well too.By storing the stuff in bags,it makes it much easier when you go to look for something.You can simply lift the bags out,it's much better than digging through a freezer full of loose stuff.My upright is an old Magic Chef.I use it as my ice maker.Works great for that because it has shelves.I don't really like it for food storage because food just keeps a lot better in the chest freezer.So if I could only choose one type,it would be a chest freezer.

Manuel defrost...foam insulation... Not fglass... Chest. The 4 commandments of FZ'ers

Also, we never buy ice for coolers. For traveling, we freeze a case of bottled water. They don't leak, and after they start to thaw just drink them

You can’t put a potential to be mounted deer head/antlers in an upright.......

Damn thats a good thought, I had to take one to the taxidermist because it was starting to stank and I didnt have time to get it all cleaned up and boiled off this week for a euro mount...

could have saves 150 bucks or so right there... bought a bigger freezer!!!

upright/manual defrost here in my basement.........defrost is no big job.......

http://www.aphome.com/appliance-blo...st-and-chest-freezer-vs-upright-freezer/

If you don't use a freezer all that much, and eat everything in it within a year, an upright frost-free will work. But if you're a "serious freezer," meaning you depend on them for much of your food supply, whether meat from game or home-raised fruit and vegetables, then non-frost free chest freezers work best.

We have three 15-cubic feet freezers, two chest and one upright, all non-frost-free. But the upright is only used for stuff my wife saves for recipes in her cookbooks, so isn't opened every week, so the packages don't get freezer-burned.

If you keep frozen stuff more than a year, non-frost free chest freezers work best.

I'm may be a bit late but I'll echo what some have said.

- chest
- non frost-free
- use milk crates for organization
- freeze milk jugs to take up empty space, this helps to maintain temps in power outages and save electric


I bought this model a couple years ago as it was the largest freezer I could get down into my non-walkout basement. It currently holds a cow elk, 2 ground deer, and some additional Costco items with room to spare.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/GE-10-6-cu-ft-Chest-Freezer-in-White-FCM11PHWW/205443672

Same here,, we replaced a Sears with a Maytag last summer,,far superior piece of equiptment!

I think I may have seen one of your earlier posts, since I remember the part about the elk and two deer.

As a result of that, and recommendations from a couple of hunting buddies, who say items get lost in the chest freezers, I bought a 16.6 cu ft Frigidaire frost-free upright. I got it during the Labor Day sale, though I expect there may be other sales.

I bought the one with only one storage crate. I found that I can get perfect sized ones very cheaply, either polymer or wire, at Walmart and thereby save at least 50 bucks, compared to the model that comes with more crates!.

Now I'm ready to bring home an elk!

Norm

I've got a 22 cubic foot chest freezer, manual defrost. I've had both and disliked all of the stuff falling out of an upright, even when I made some retainers to hold stuff on the shelf. I found it harder to dig for stuff in the back of an upright than I did from the bottom of a chest freezer. Our mileage does vary. Wear steel toed shoes when you open an upright and especially if you dig for something at the back of a shelf.

With my kids grown we don't need that much space but it sure is nice if you have a large deer rack in velvet to put it in whole and let it freeze dry, a whole lynx till you have time to skin it, or store a bear hide etc. till you can get it to a tannery. We have lots of wild berries in it, large buys on sale food items, frozen whole ears of corn, and when it gets low, we fill the empty space with frozen water bottles especially half gallon and quart size. I made spacer dividers from 1/8 inch veneer panels that fit in slots on the walls, and also have boxes filled with same category items. Our freezer is old. I've had it for 12 years and bought it used from a fridge repair man who had put a new and larger compressor in it. The top makes a useful temporary table in my garage, and we use the freezer so much that we never let items accumulate on the lid.

Gotta go cut up a deer.

Will add that in our town where they make us fanatically sort garbage into seven categories, we put our stinky garbage into our freezer till pick-up morning. The garbage man picks up a frozen block of kitchen compostables. Big space is nice. Living in town, I also I freeze the bones and throw away parts of deer etc. till I can haul them back to the woods. Keeps them from stinking. If you got the space, use it.