Dedicated freezers are useful for anyone who wants extra space for long-term food storage, including large families, hunters, people who might have trouble getting to a store for an extended period, or really anyone who would like to make fewer trips to the grocery store.
Just make sure you keep it in a basement or an area of your home where the temperature tends to be stable. If you want to put a freezer in your garage, you should make sure it’s built for an environment with wide temperature swings. Such freezers are usually described as “garage-ready” in the specs. (We also have a .)
This guide covers upright freezers, which look and operate just like a regular refrigerator with shelves—only at subfreezing temperatures and with a single door. The other main type of freezer is a . Uprights offer more space with a smaller physical footprint.
Most of the experts we spoke with agreed that uprights are more convenient for retrieving and organizing food than chest freezers, because you don’t have to dig around for items buried at the bottom of a pile. Greg F, a hunter from California with decades of experience, told us that uprights are ideal for the same reason. “I piled elk on top of ducks and dove in a chest freezer and had to move the elk meat every time I wanted duck or dove,” he said. “I had a hell of a time just finding the dove.”
Also, unlike many chest freezers, the vast majority of uprights are frost-free, meaning you’ll never have to manually defrost the inside.
On the other hand, all of that shelving means there is more unused space than you’d find in a chest-style freezer, which you can stuff with more food. This makes uprights slightly less efficient than chests because all of that idle air forces the freezer to work harder to maintain temperature—costing you an extra $10 to $20 a year to operate, compared with chests. (Uprights tend to be a bit pricier than chest freezers, too.)
Upright freezers also allow more air to move around inside the freezer, exposing food to wider temperature swings and an increased chance of freezer burn. But you can avoid this risk by tightly wrapping or your food. Freezer burn may or may not be a problem for you; it depends on a lot of factors: how often you open the door, how much empty space is in the freezer, where in your home you place the freezer, and what foods you are freezing.