[Best Buy] Insignia 5.0 Cu. Ft. Chest Freezer (NS-CZ50WH6-C) - White - Only at Best Buy - $159.95

-4 degrees Celsius and up to 109 degrees Celsius

Made for some extreme conditions!

Free delivery is awesome.
Note that it's pretty small - but perfect for me, because I don't want to forget about roasts in the bottom of the freezer!
It's also manual defrost.

The delivery service flipped the freezer end over end to get it up my stairs. It was cracked all along the lip.

Is manual defrost good?

MechanicalMan64 wrote: ↑ Is manual defrost good?

Nope...

MechanicalMan64 wrote: ↑ Is manual defrost good?

Depends.
Manual defrost is better for your food, harder for your labour...
Manual defrost has less freezer burn, more stable temperatures. Also cheaper electricity and quieter... But they're a little more effort to defrost.

Manual defrost is better IF you do the work to defrost it. Better (as noted above) = more energy efficient, better for your food (less freezer burn) and is also cheaper.

To keep a manual defrost working efficiently, you need to do a full defrost once per year. This means you need to take everything out, let all the ice melt out (after picking out big chunks). Otherwise, the freezer will become less efficient, and eventually prematurely break down.

For me, I stick with auto-defrost. Cause, where will you put everything while the freezer defrosts? When I was a kid and did this, we did it in winter (Alberta), and stuffed everything in a big cooler and took it outside ... This doesn't work as well in Vancouver unless you want to feed the bears and racoons. ;-)

Auto-defrost are now much better than they used to be in terms of efficiency and protecting food from freezer burn. Expect to pay a little more upfront, but to me this makes up for need to go through the manual defrost cycle (if you've never done this, I promise, you don't want to). The freezer on your kitchen fridge is auto-defrost for this same reason -- no one wants to deal with a manual defrost anymore.