freezer temp swing

I'm confused - how do you know that the temp. is ranging -20 to +5 without opening the lid ? .. digital display read-out .. ?

Full vs empty certainly affects the _efficiency_ of the freezer - as it's opened & closed - - but the freezer should still maintain the proper temperature range ..

As dumb as it sounds - ice cream is a pretty fair < and yummy ! > yardstick for freezer temp. - too easy to scoop - not cold enough. - rock-hard to scoop - a little too cold.

John T. < first snow here today >

Frost free refrigerator freezer is right around 32 degrees F but chest freezer for long term storage should be zero or lower. I have two small chest freezers but never checked them and they do not have temperature controls.

Yeah. My frost-free fridge/freezer is 37 F in the fridge and 6 F in the freezer. (Funny, I thought the freezer was a couple degrees colder.)

Mine is always 37/0. Only time it fluctuates is when a door is open for some time. Independent of the two main compartments is a drawer that I can vary to anything between those two.

I have a small digital thermometer with a remote probe that records the high/low temps until you reset it . Meant for indoor/outdoor use but it works well for this too . This freezer was for short term storage , we kept bread and stuff that we expected to cook withing a couple of weeks in it .

Whirlpool and GE both say the freezer alarms should go off if the temperature hits 10º F above your intended temperature.

Thanks dean , that explains a lot . I don't know why it failed , but I'm going to monitor the temps for a couple of weeks before I trust it with food again . It could have been caused by a brief power outage/surge , a couple of other electronic items (clock and the DRO on my milling machine) indicated they'd had a power interruption .

Freezers are supposed to be well insulated**, so a power interruption, especially a brief one, should not cause the temp to change much.

And I don't know what the swing shoudl be, but it should not be 25 degrees. That's absurd.

Despite all this, I dont' like throwing things away, even parts, for not good reason, since you have a way to monotor it, I might wait and see if settles down. Otherwise, I'd replace the thermostat. (Or clean the contacts on the current one, if it actually has mechanical contacts, but once they foul, I'd expect them to foul again more quickly than the first time.)

Depending on how the freezer is made, it's probably easier to replace the thermostat when it's empty. At t he very least, you don't have warm air filling the freezer when it's full of frozen food. I only know refrigerators, and they have the thermostat access inside.

Is that a so-called "frost free" refrigerator? If so, when it's in its automatic defrost mode, the heating coils kick in and can raise the temperature an annoying amount.

Slightly related:

My mother was far from stupid. We had a fridge with a self-defrosting freezer that was bought about 1954. And she could never get it to work right. She wanted it to defrost in the middle of the night, so she set the clock in it to 3AM but it would not defrost then.

I think it was the last year she had it that someone figured out that she was supposed to set the clock to the current time, and then it would defrost in the middle of the night. If instead she set it to 3AM at

Nope , not a frost free . This one has the evap coils in the inner lining of the box , no fans or defrost timers .

If you're looking only at the recorded max/min, how do you know the max is occurring after it's settled down and not due to having it open to put the thermometer in?