Frost free freezers for fish

[7066]

Are frost free freezers really horrible for freezing fish or just not quite as good???

[FishFood]

My understanding is that frost free freezers thaw a little bit from time to time, which is fine for short-term storage, but will wreck your fish over time.

[Freakwater]

Wow....I've never understood how frost free freezers do what they do. Is this true? That's terrible. I have my chest freezer much cooler than my kitchen freezer. I had no idea it was freezing and thawing. Any more input on this? Tell me it ain't so!

Freak

[Freakwater]

Found this on newscientist.com:

"Frost-free freezing

Question
I've just bought a brand new freezer that never needs defrosting. I understand how, in old freezers, condensation introduced each time the door is opened leads to surfaces frosting up. But I can't work out how this can be avoided in the new non-frosting models. So how do they make my life so much easier?

Martin Ryan , Harrow, Middlesex, UK

Answer
In conventional freezers, water in the humid air introduced by opening the door condenses and freezes on cold surfaces. Because these surfaces stay cold as long as the freezer is operating, the frost accumulates continually and can only be removed by scraping or raising the temperature inside the freezer by switching the freezer off.

The component in a freezer which absorbs heat from the surroundings is the evaporator. In a conventional freezer it is located in the food compartment with cold air circulating by convection. In a frost-free freezer the evaporator is located in a separate compartment and the cold air is circulated to the food compartment by a fan. The humid air drawn over the evaporator by the fan deposits its condensation on the evaporator and the resulting dry air is circulated to the food compartment, avoiding frost on food and other cold surfaces.

The frost that builds up on the evaporator gradually reduces its efficiency and must be removed. This happens automatically by means of a system that switches off the compressor (to stop the evaporator cooling), switches off the fan (to stop the warming air from circulating to the food compartment) and switches on a heater (to raise the temperature of the evaporator over 0 ýC).

The water produced from melting ice is usually collected in a trough and fed outside the freezer via a tube to drip onto the top of the still-hot compressor, where it evaporates in the atmosphere. After a predetermined time, the heater is switched off and the compressor and fan are switched back on, restoring the circulation of cold, dry air to the food compartment."

Sounds to me like it ain't so...
Freak

[7066]

Sounds to me if you have a new frost free you need not worry about any warming and refreezing issues.

[Waterfish]

Its' not true. I researched this quite a bit before I bought my last freezer. Frost-free freezers suck the humidity out of air which keeps them from frosting up. If you have fish, (or whatever) that is wrapped in butcher paper, then a frostless freezer WILL eventually suck the moisture out of the food and ruin it. There is an easy solultion to this problem: If you have meat that is wrapped in butcher paper, put those packages of meat inside of zip lock freezer bags and zip them shut. We're still eating an elk that I shot in 2002. All of the packages of meat were wrapped in butcher paper and then sealed in zip lock freezer bags. That meat is in just as good of shape now as it was when we froze it. I have a food saver vaccume machine, and all of the fish we catch get vaccume packaged and frozen, and when its' thawed it is almost as good as fresh. The only time you would need to worry about meat in a frostless freezer is when that meat is not sealed in an air tight plastic bag. We never have to move everything out of the frostless freezer to defrost it. I would never buy a non frostless freezer.