This post was supposed to be published on Halloween because it’s kind of scary and gross. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
About a month ago I sang the praises of our deep freeze. I shared the many different foods the you can freeze. Apparently many of you love using your freezers too because that post was quite popular and was shared a lot.
Before you put all your proverbial eggs in the deep freeze basket, let me share with you “The Freezer Nightmare” from our collection of life experiences that we never want to have to go through again.
When we moved into my in-laws’ basement just over two years ago, we brought our deep freeze with us. At first it was just a giant storage chest. We didn’t plug it in because we weren’t planning to stay long. As you know, that plan changed.
My in-laws have an enormous deep freeze that is always packed to the brim with all manner of garden produce, bulk foods, and meat bought at a discount. When the holidays rolled around and turkeys and hams were on sale, I offered to plug in our freezer so my mother-in-law would be able to stock up (since we had taken over their spare upright fridge/freezer). I was also excited to have more space to stock up for my family.
Discovery
Fast forward to February. For a week or so, each night Mr. SixFiguresUnder got home from work he would comment that the house smelled strange. I had been there all day and I couldn’t smell anything. I tried not to be offended by what could be a slight to my cooking or housekeeping.
Then one night as we were putting the kids to bed, he bent down to pick up something near our deep freeze. He noticed that bad smell again, only stronger, so he opened to freezer to track the smell.
From the back bedroom, I heard him gagging, so I ran to see what was going on. I found my husband doubled over gagging, unable to speak. Once he regained his composure, he filled me in on his terrible discovery.
Side Note #1: Mr. SixFiguresUnder is tough stuff. I have a very weak stomach, so he, being the gem he is, handles all the throw up and gross, growing fridge foods in our family. I’d never seen him such bad shape.
Sure enough, the freezer had gotten unplugged, what must have been weeks earlier, as nothing was even remotely cold. Oh, it WAS BAD!
Digging
We finished getting the kids to bed and then assessed the situation. What in the world could we do with a freezer full of very, very rotten meat? This thrifty DIY girl just wanted to pay someone to come take it away! In the boonies late at night there really isn’t anyone who provides such a service.
Knowing it was going to be a long night, Mr. SixFiguresUnder (we may as well call him “the Hero” from here on out), already clad in pajamas, grabbed a shovel and headed to the back of the property where we rarely go. I went along with him to “help.” The other option was to stay in the house where the smell of death was wafting.
He chose a spot near a tree so the ground would be a little softer. He dug and dug until the hole was wide enough and deep enough to fit a freezer-ful of food and still have a few feet of dirt on top.
Of all the benefits of living in the boonies, this is not one that I would have after considered. What would you think if you saw your neighbor digging a grave-sized hole late at night at the back of his property?
Don’t let the short-sleeves fool you. It really is February. I’m bundled up in a winter coat, hat and gloves. Apparently you can work up a good sweat digging a grave. (Taking pictures in the dark is no easy task either.)
Side Note #2: Did I mention that Mr. SixFiguresUnder is tough stuff? He believes in getting a workout by doing hard work (as opposed to going to the gym), so digging an enormous hole solo is right up his alley.
Dumping
Once the hole was complete, we had to figure out how to fill it. The freezer was too heavy to carry when it was full, so we had to remove the putrid contents. By “we” I mean the Hero.
My mother-in-law gave us these plastic tubs to use to transfer the food freezer’s contents. We loaded the tubs into the wheelbarrow and made several trips out to the big hole.
The environmental folks aren’t going to like this, but we threw everything in, bags, packages and all. I would challenge anyone else to do differently!
We covered the contents of the hole with plenty of dirt. We mounded it up slightly to account for it settling and decomposing over time. Now, a year and a half later, you wouldn’t even know that we have a mini landfill in our backyard.
Details (*for those with strong stomachs*)
The plastic packaging on the turkeys was so bloated that they exploded with a pop when we (ahem, the Hero) tossed them into the hole. A partial gallon of milk that we had put in the freezer when we had gone out of town also exploded upon entry into its final resting place.
As he removed the meat, the Hero told me that the bottom of the freezer had 6 to 8 inches of pink liquid in it that needed to be dumped. I couldn’t bear to look, so I had him take a picture so I could look at it later without the accompanying smell.
Together we hefted the freezer up the stairs and far out on the property to dump the pink liquid and hose out the inside. We used a gallon of bleach to scrub the freezer thoroughly. We left it outside with the lid open for a couple of weeks before we dared bring it inside our house. We loaded it up with baking soda and plugged it back in. I’m happy to report that there are no lingering odors from the ordeal.
Prevention
Living in an unfinished basement, many of the outlets are high in the wall instead of near the ground. This was the case with the freezer’s outlet. The cord from the freezer had to reach 6 feet high on the wall to be plugged in. It must have been inadvertently unplugged when someone set something on the freezer.
Many of the large-capacity freezers, like the enormous one my in-laws have, have an alarm that beeps every minute when the unit loses power. We learned the hard way that that is a very valuable feature.
Checking the freezer for power became part of our nightly bedtime routine, right after locking the door. Fortunately (or unfortunately) our deep freeze is in our “living room” so it’s pretty convenient.
I figured there had to be a way to install some sort of alarm that would notify us if our freezer wasn’t getting power or if the temperature was rising. Sure enough, you can get freezer alarms
If your deep freeze doesn’t have a built-in alarm, I highly recommend getting an alarm or setting up a routine freezer check. Freezers can save you so much money, but when things go wrong, the loss can be painful!
How about you?
- Have you had a freezer disaster?
- Do you have a freezer alarm?
When my mother passed away in 2000 . My brothers , sister and I had the task of cleaning and packing up everything in the family home . You have a lot of ,do you remember . Oh ya I remember that . Why did mom & dad keep all that ? It was very interesting . Well anyway when we got to the garage the freezer was unplugged . Ughhh the smell was awful . There must have been 300.00 dollars worth of spoiled food in there .
We have a freezer in the garage. And yes, it is wonderful to “stock” up on food especially since we have a side by side fridge that the freezer doesn’t hold much.
A few years ago, a frozen item shifted and popped the door open, unknown to us….and two or three days later we had the same catastrophe and all that food was lost…especially since we had just loaded it.
I don’t think an alarm would work as it is in the garage and one needs to go out to the garage, we don’t have direct access to the garage.
If it were inside….yup…I would have one.
What an awful experience and lucky that you have a big property to go bury it in.
We are in a suburb and garbage pick up was several days away. Hubby triple bagged all that rotten food and put in the garbage…and that was in the days when they didn’t have auto pick-up for garbage cans…which meant the guy had to lift it up…ugh….
We do a check frequently….It can happen again….
Nancy
wildoakdesigns.blogspot.com
In the case of a power outage lasting more than 24 hours where you loss your food & freezer items, your Utility Companies should reimburse the loss.
Keep your grocery receipts always as proof of purchase. In PA, after Sandy I was able to have all my food/freezer costs reimbursed as I stocked up with pending storm. I never expected Sandy to affect so far inland to Philadelphia Suburbs for power loss over a week. Yet I had no physical damage to my property, surrounding areas had substantial damages.
Advice: keep ALL those grocery receipts!
That’s a good point Stephanie! I hadn’t thought of that. In our case, it actually wasn’t a power outage, just a plug that was accidentally unplugged, but that’s a really good tip for the future. 🙂 Thanks for sharing your experience!
Our freezer is in the basement and our home is wired with two different breaker boxes. The one that the freezer is hooked up to runs almost nothing in the house except a couple basement lights and the freezer. I had lucked out on a huge sale and spent $300 on approximately $1000 worth of meat. My husband was unemployed so it was a stretch but it would have fed is for months. After a few weeks I depleted what was in my refrigerator freezer and went to get some meat. It happened so fast, I opened the lid and grabbed a freezer bag of mushy chicken. I also don’t handle these things well. I slammed the lid, plugged it back in and ran. The house smelled like death for days.
Oh Robin, I feel your pain! It is such a horrid smell, not to mention all of the waste. So sorry you had to deal with this too!
This was too funny to read! I’m really sorry it happened, I would be devastated if this happened to our freezer. But I love how you tell the story.
Thanks Lindsay. It’s much easier to look back on the experience and laugh now that time has passed! 🙂
First, I’m a longtime reader of your blog, but this is my first comment. We actually had this same thing happen to us in 2012. We keep our deep freezer in the garage. Apparently during one of our “clean out & organize the garage” fests, we somehow must have unplugged the freezer by mistake and didn’t notice it. Pretty sure it was about a week later we discovered it, when I opened the freezer to get something out. The smell wasn’t as bad as you’d think (thank heavens it wasn’t August in Texas), but it was SO maddening. We were struggling financially at the time, and unfortunately we lost several hundred dollars of meat, vegetables, etc. We live in the city & have a trash bin with wheels, so we just wheeled it around & tossed everything into bags and into the bin, so it wasn’t as bad as your midnight burial. LOL. We had to scrub it out with bleach & let it sit in the sun for a day or so before we plugged it back in. I feel your pain!
That’s so frustrating Pam! I’m glad you found it after a week (I’m pretty sure ours was quite a bit longer). It’s so sad to lose all that meat and other food! 🙁
I am so sorry….but your telling of this was hilarious. I was looking for a good recipe and ended up here. I know it was terrible to lose all that food, but you were so funny in the telling.
It was terrible and disgusting at the time, but we are good sports about it, so we can look back and laugh (but at the same time pray it never happens again)! 🙂
Worst situation I ever dealt with was when I was house-sitting for my parents. It was terribly hot that summer, and as fate would have it, the freezer stopped working. Thankfully, my roommate and I found it about 8-10 hours after we assume it stopped working. It wasn’t frozen anymore, but it was still cool. Let’s say that we put lots of cooking devices to use, and spent about 8 hours cooking/processing food. We didn’t know how long exactly it had been or if it’d be safe to re-freeze as it was. We cooked, well, EVERYTHING, re-packaged, and brought everything back to our apartment freezer until my parents returned. Luckily we got to keep a lot of stuff which helped our budget, but it wasn’t an ideal way to have it happen.
What a gem of a husband you have! We lost our refrigerator once, and I thought I was being helpful to keep some spoiled things in there until trash day 3 days later. My poor husband had the duty of dealing with the spoiled stuff when it was really ripe:(
When my husband and I had been married a few years, my parents had been given a chest freezer that was about 3 years old. They didn’t want to clean out their older, larger freezer, so they gave us the newer one – we were elated! About 6 or 7 years later, I had put a brisket in the freezer, and 3 days later opened the freezer to get something for dinner. I noticed the brisket wasn’t frozen at all, so we had a repairman check it for us. He told us the compressor had gone out, and frankly it would be cheaper to purchase a new freezer than replace the compressor.
By this time a deep freezer was a necessity for our growing family, so I went to the appliance store and told my tale, especially the frustration over a 10 or 11 year old freezer quitting vs. my parents’ freezer that was about 30 years old. He told me that appliances are now being made to last about 10 years to force consumers to replace them, and consequently for appliance manufacturers to sell more items. My parents’ freezer is now approaching 50 years; it doesn’t look pretty on the outside but it works like a gem on the inside! We’ve been married 29 years, and we’re on our 3rd freezer (and second refrigerator – I’m waiting for that one to bite the dust any time now).
It’s crazy how appliances are made “disposable” these days. On My grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary, they took a photo with their circa 1950 kenmore fridge that was still going strong. The handle had broken, so you had to use a screwdriver to open it, but it worked just fine!
Hooray for husbands that do the dirty work!
I can’t even imagine what that smell was like and I’d gag too. My folks have a deep freezer and my mother sifts through the items once a week.
Be glad your computer isn’t equipped with smellovision. It was baaaaad!
First let me say I am so sorry you guys went through this. I am a frugal girl so I would have been very upset to loose all that meat. Now let me say you had me laughing out loud!!! I can’t even imagine this happening to us! Crazy!
It is a funny story in retrospect. We definitely learned our lesson the hard way!
What a horrific evening!! I especially appreciate the humor of digging a grave in the backyard. You took the exact same approach I would have chosen for myself. We too depend on a deep freezer for keeping extra meat and veggies. Fortunately ours does have an alarm. I’ve even observed it in action – apparently the door had been left open by just a little – definitely not enough to notice though. So the alarm saved us from being able to share our own nightmare.
Hooray for a built-in alarm that works! I like a happy ending!
How timely. I read this post a couple hours ago and returned from running errands. I noticed that the power was off to our chest freezer and had been for three days due to a breaker being flipped inadvertantly to off. Thankfully the meat was still mostly frozen so no bad smells but nothing was salvageable. Sadly we lost our supply of frozen breast milk for our son as well as weeks worth of meals, veggies, fruit for smoothies etc.
Happened once before when I was cleaning my mom’s house many years ago. She had passed away and one of the items she left behind was a giant chest freezer. To move it we had to thaw everything and soon realized it must have been off at some point because all the meat was rotten. The whole house stunk for days.
Now of to get an alarm
I’m glad your meat was safe, but that’s so sad about the breast milk! That stuff is like gold! That’s sad about your mom’s freezer! The smell of rotten meal is something hard to beat.
Oh gosh, that’s awful! I have a sensitive stomach too, and can’t deal with gross things/smells. My fiance is a hero in that regard, too. I had no idea freezers came with alarms – I’ll definitely keep that in mind for the future. It’s always saddening to see food go to waste. One year, a hurricane came through, and the power was out much longer than expected. The ice bags we made for the freezer melted, and my parents had to throw everything out.
It’s nice to have people in our lives who can handle the things we can’t! 🙂
You married a good one!
Oh you better believe it! And this story is only the tip of the iceberg. He’s awesome!
Whew! This is a funny story…in retrospect, and since it didn’t happen to me 🙂 I’ve had to toss food after power failures a few times, but never in such an epic fashion.
“Epic” is a great word for it Cecilia! It is kind of funny (yet still ultra gross) in retrospect.
Before Sandy a few years ago, we had just put about $900 worth of prepared meals into the freezer, and left for the weekend to Ohio (Cedar Point!). When we heard about Sandy, we bought a generator in Ohio – because there was no way there was going to be one available in the DC area – and brought it home with us. Luckily, we didn’t need it then, but we did need it last winter after an ice storm took power out for two days. The fridge stuff we just tossed out in the snow/ice in plastic containers, and the freezer was hooked up to the generator for one hour on, 4 hours off…
Smart thinking to buy the generator in Ohio! I’m glad everything turned out fine! PS- I love Cedar Point! It’s been ages since I’ve been though.
Definitely a pack your bags and call a realtor moment. 🙂
HUGE thanks to your hubby for taking care of most of it. Yikes!
YES! My hubby is a champ! 🙂
One question, how did you get the stink out of your freezer? This happened to me last year and I tried to get the smell out but couldn’t. I just closed it up and now i seat things on it.
We have a whole house generator so we are not afraid of a power failure. However, if the freezer itself fails, we are not protected from that. So, hubby checks the freezer every morning and every night and while that might be a little obsessive-compulsive, it keeps us informed about such problems. We are planning on selling our house in 2016 and the freezer will stay with the house, so we are planning on getting a new one with a built in alarm for the new place.
Our second freezer is out in the garage unplugged. No horror stories, thankfully, but we just figured we weren’t really saving any money.
I did unplug a mini fridge once without cracking the door. We just threw it away…
My folks long touted the benefits of a chest freezer at the bottom of the basement stairs…until we lost power for about a week and all those “savings” got sadly tossed out. Now they tout the benefits of a chest freezer AND a generator.
Thank you for posting the information on the alarm. I had no idea those were available. We have 2 freezers, one being older and had been wondering “what if”. Now we have a solution!!
A couple stories
One time when my parents were going out of town, my dad thought he would be helpful and turn the power off in their garage to save electricity. He forgot the freezer was hooked up to the garage power. Not a pretty sight.
One time my husband was helping bring groceries in and set a whole bag of frozen meat near the freezer, thinking he would go back and put it away, which he forgot to do.