How long does it take a freezer to freeze

[TW]

Hi All,

Possibly a poor choice of group to ask this but you seem a friendly (and observant) bunch.

I have just acquired a frost free freezer (10 cu ft upright) and it seemed to take an age to get from ambient to a decent freezing temperature.

Usefully it has a temperature display so it was quite easy to monitor speed of cooling. The temperature display is reasonably accurate.

Its in a room at about 15C ambient and it took 1.5hrs to get to freezing and another 1.5hrs to make -18C while still empty.

This seems like a very long time just to cool an empty freezer and makes me question whether it is faulty. Anyone here got anything similar and did you take any rough measurements of freezing time?

I'll fill it with food and see if it keeps it cold but if anyone has any info to help me make a decision whether it is faulty or not, it would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Trev.

[ARWadworth]

You do not say how old the freezer is but I would not worry about it taking

3 hours for my 6 year old freezer to reach -18C.

You must have heard that "a watched pot never boils". For freezers "a watched freezer never freezes"

Adam

[Mr Sandman]

Not really timed it before, but it sounds about right.

Steve

[Pete C]

Might have a fair bit of added thermal mass, so it keeps stuff frozen when there's a power cut.

cheers, Pete.

[Dave Liquorice]

It's not just cooling the air it also has to bring all the walls, shelves and a substantial part of the insulation down as well. 1.5hrs from 0C to

-18C doesn't seem to shabby. Ours has just taken about 6 hours to get back down to -23C, in "super freeze" mode after having 4 loaves of bread shoved in it. It will get down to -30 if left in super freeze. Conventional, frosty, Energy Class A, fridge/freezer but with independant compressors for the fridge and freezer.

[geoff]

In message , TW writes

Go and find something important to worry about

30 degrees in 90 mins - 3 mins/ degree is hardly outlandishly slow

I bought a new septic style freezer last month and it took 6 hours to get the icemaker to work - they quote 24 hours in the manual

[TW]

Thanks to all for the replies,

It appears that it does have quite a large thermal mass, I had assumed that the mass was generally the contents and the freezer itself was pretty much all insulation.

10 kilos of fridge temperature meat only lifed it up a couple of degrees temporarily so it appears OK.

I'll go back to worrying about the baggage retreival system they have at Heathrow now!