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I have a chest freezer in the garage.

It’s great, it costs very little to run.

But it’s a beast to organize.

For a while we had piles of loose frozen things, which eventually got all mixed up, so we had no idea what was hiding in there.

Now I have some plastic crates stacked inside - but the bottom level is a mystery bc nobody’s ever wants to lift out a 20lb crate to see what lies beneath.

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My wife did this with ours but took it a step further: the has a whiteboard in the kitchen with an inventory of exactly what we have in the chest freezer. It works well, except for once in a while when she takes something out but forgets to update the inventory. I offered to build her a barcode system but so far she hasn’t taken me up on it :p

Our chest freezer is white and works basically as its own whiteboard. We just scrawl on the top with dry wipe markers what's in there.

What about barcodes? Not expensive. Should offer a quick return.

We just write on the lid of the freezers we have. They're white, so why not?

I built a platform that lifts via linear actuators. When down it sits on bottom. When up, it comes near the opening. On top of it, is an adjustable metal rack similar to what you’d find in a commercial kitchen or sold at a big box hardware store. The rack almost fully fits the interior space when closed. When I open the freezer it can all lift up and I have perfect 360 access (although reaching through the front is easiest since it’s not too deep). We probably lose a lot of the cold air when we lift it but keep thermal mass high and only open it a couple times a month and organize in a way that we don’t have to lift the shelf most times (low frequency items on bottom).

Over kill probably, but my wife is short so it pays dividends.

Please make a video! This sounds great.

We had a power cut while on holiday. No real damage or loss but the bottom layer is now re-frozen icecream, probably caused by something not quite sealed being stacked sideways.

We keep a cool whip container filled with water, with a quarter under the lid, on top of the water in the top of our freezer.

Then, when (not if) we lose power for a while, we duct tape the lid to the freezers closed. Once power comes back on, we check the quarter. It's a pretty good indicator of what we should get rid of, based on how far in the container the quarter has sunk and re-frozen.

I always wonder how effective the upper freezer is at keeping the lower refrigerator cold during an outage.

I know spoilage is a spectrum (10C is still much better than 20C), but also wondered how much or little passive cooling there is.

Before buying my chest freezer I did some investigation about organization approaches. I found several articles and one that caught my attention was about using ikea recycling bins ( HÅLLBAR 3 and 6 gallon - search for 204.202.03 and 803.980.58) with handles that have the perfect size and weight distribution to be stacked into a 7.2cu chest freezer. The plastic material also seems to hold very well to the cold. Here's a video of someone following the same approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydbsVS5rbSM

Having used some in commercial environments they typically use horizontally sliding trays and leave an empty space on each layer to reach under. Apparently systems that pulls out vertically also exist but I have never seen one.

Sounds like a 'reason' for a RasPi project!

Pi, camera, small screen, and some image recognition ?

To para-phrase a famous BBC journalist embedded on a U.K. aircraft carrier during the Falklands war and restricted on what he was allowed to say:

"... I counted them all out, and I counted them all back." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hanrahan#Falklands_War

I covered the bottom of mine with ice blocks. (I filled empty milk cartons with ice.) Very useful to put in a cooler; and even more useful to give out to friends during power outages.

The ice blocks push all the food up to the top of the chest freezer, and it helps remind us not to overfill it.

Sounds like you need some sort of inventory system. Maybe number everything, or add a barcode. We're been considering a box freezer so this is something to keep in mind for us.

Why replace one chore with another. My solution was a height adjustable platform, so I can easily lift/lower the entire contents with a push of a button.

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