Urgent Warning for Montanans With Freezers in Their Home

If you keep a freezer in your garage in Montana, you might think it’s the perfect solution for storing extra meat after hunting season. When winter hits hard, and it always does, that convenience can quickly turn into a headache. I learned that lesson the hard way a couple winters back.

Like a lot of Montanans, I go hunting with the hope of filling up my freezer. After a successful elk or deer harvest, freezer space becomes prime real estate. The small compartment in the kitchen fridge doesn’t even come close to cutting it, so a few years back, I bought a big chest freezer and set it up in my garage. It seemed like the perfect spot, until it wasn’t.

Urgent Warning for Montanans With Freezers in Their Home

One afternoon, I walked out to grab some steaks for dinner and noticed something wasn’t right. The garage smelled a bit funky. When I lifted the freezer lid, I was met with the kind of sight no hunter wants to see. Packages of thawed meat, dripping and ruined. My freezer had completely stopped running.

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At first, I thought maybe it had just lost power, but that wasn’t it. A repair tech later confirmed what I never would’ve guessed: the cold weather was to blame.

It sounds strange, but freezers aren’t designed to handle extreme cold. According to Consumer Reports, most freezers are built to operate in environments above 0°F and below 110°F. Once the temperature dips below zero, the oil inside the compressor can thicken and stop circulating properly. When that happens, the compressor can seize up, essentially freezing to death.

That’s exactly what happened to mine. The temperatures in my garage dropped well below zero for several nights in a row. The air inside the freezer wasn’t that much colder than the air outside, so the thermostat never kicked on. The compressor stopped running, and everything inside slowly thawed out as the cold spell ended.

If you keep your freezer in an unheated garage or shed, you’ll want to take some precautions before winter sets in:

• Check the temperature range in your freezer’s manual. If it’s not rated for “garage use,” it might not survive extreme cold.
• Insulate your garage or move the freezer to a more temperature-controlled space. Even a few degrees warmer can make a big difference.
• Monitor it regularly. Open it once a week to make sure it’s still running.
• Use the quarter test. Freeze a cup of water and place a quarter on top. If you ever find the quarter at the bottom, that means your freezer thawed at some point.

Montana winters are no joke. They can turn steel brittle and stop engines in their tracks. A garage freezer might seem tough, but even it has limits. Before the next cold front moves in, make sure your freezer is ready. Otherwise, you could end up losing more than just a few pounds of meat. You might lose an entire season’s worth of hard work.