How to monitor your freezer with ADT Pulse

16 Apr How to monitor your freezer with ADT Pulse

Maintaining  the best possible temperature in a freezer or cooler is critical. If the temperature is either too cold or too warm, you can waste food and money to spoiling. Each year, Americans lose a significant amount of money on food spoilage just due to a freezer door that was open overnight. So if you have this problem, here’s how to avoid it by monitoring your freezer with an alarm system like ADT Pulse. 

What Happens When a Freezer Door is Left Open?

When a freezer door remains opens overnight, extremely moist, warm air can rise on the interior of the freezer door. Then, when this air contacts the front part of the freezer’s cooling component, it results in the water freezing on the cooling element.

This leads to your freezer failing to get rid of the ice because the ice is away from where the frost-free device is effective. Leaving a freezer door open for even a short period can freeze the entire healing element into an ice block, preventing cold air from circulating and a freezer from getting back into its normal operational temperature.

What You Can Do When This Happens

• First, using a food thermometer, measure the inside temperature of your stored freezer food. A temperature that’s less than 41 degrees F is considered safe for food consumption.
• Even if it isn’t that temperature, you can still eat the food if the temperature has been higher than 41 degrees F for less than two hours. But if you have any doubt about what to do, just throw the food away.
• Next, check to see whether or not your freezer is still cooling properly. Your freezer is likely okay if it continues to run smoothly.
• However, if this isn’t the case, you’ll need to fix the problem.
• After unplugging and emptying out your freezer, try to save your food by asking a neighbor if you can store it in their freezer. 
• Once your freezer has completed thawed out, turn it back on to see if it’s working. If not, call a repairman.

Misconception

Contrary to what most people believe, temperature doesn’t cause freezer burn. Instead, freezer burn occurs when food becomes dehydrated by air. In other words, freezer burn is caused by air exposure and not by temperature. To prevent freezer burn, use quality storage containers.

Considerations and Warnings

• Consider that the optimal temperature for freezing food is –10 degrees F (-23 degrees C). Even though the freezing temperature for many foods is roughly 32 degrees F, it’s best to store your food at 0 degrees F so that deterioration can be slower.
• You can eat food that’s stored at 0 degrees F, but it’s not as tasty.
• Keeping a full freezer can help your food remain colder longer. Doing so also means using less energy for maintaining an optimal freezer temperature.
• After your foods have been frozen, group them together since this can help keep them cold. This can be beneficial during a power outage because solid masses make a freezer more energy-efficient.
• During a power outage, if your freezer is full of frozen food, it will keep for about two days. However, if your freezer is only half full, the food will only remain frozen for just half a day.
• Food that’s stored in a freezer with a temperature that’s greater than 0 degrees F, has fewer nutrients than food that’s stored properly in a freezer with the right temperature.

Monitor your freezer with ADT Pulse

Just by leaving a freezer door open for a few hours, you can lose expensive meats along with other frozen foods. But you can avoid this problem just by having an alarm system like ADT Pulse that notifies you whenever your freezer door has been left open.

This is only one of the many alarm notifications offered by Zions Security Alarms. Want to find out more about our ADT Pulse home automation for freezer doors, medicine cabinets, garage doors, gun safes and other devices? Please contact us to learn about our wide range of products and services.