Freezer

Erin Mae doesn't have a freezer. I dread to think what one of those might do to the batteries and, anyway, there's not really room. The fridge has one of those hanging compartments with a floppy door which freezes nothing, but produces a film of ice over the inside and a constant supply of cold drips underneath. Its main value is that it keeps fresh meat satisfactorily chilled. So we've discovered we can live perfectly well without a freezer. Adjust and cope.

But the house is a different matter, and the time has come to replace the tall one from Comet which is 28 years old. An electrician who came to fix something else told us we would probably re-coup the cost of a new one in a couple of year, just from the greater efficiency. We've also had a second, relatively old fridge sitting next to it in the garage, and the obvious thing was to replace both with a fridge freezer. Question: could we live with the reduced amount of freezer space? The answer from the Erin Mae experience is that we probably could.

Of course, it's never that simple. A little research shows that modern freezers expect an ambient temperature of at least 10˚C. Counter-intuitively, anything less than that and they start to de-frost. They like to be kept inside, in the warm (just as well we didn't have one in our kitchen when I was growing up!). But ours is in the garage and I'm sure that, even though that's integral with the rest of the house, it gets down below 10˚ when there's a freeze on outside. There are some horror stories out there of manufacturers not honouring warranties.

Fortunately we discovered that Grundig have recently entered the British market with an A++ model which, they say, will operate down to 5˚. It got a thumbs-up from Which, and we've taken the plunge. Today Currys delivered it and took away the old machines. It's up and running, and we managed to get into the new freezer everything we took out of the old one. So far, so good.

However, it really feels funny to have a fridge freezer by Grundig sitting in the garage. 1950s tape recorder, yes. Radio, yes. But fridge freezer…?