Old Basement Refrigerator

 I had an old refrigerator in the kitchen.  It wasn't the original one, but it was probably about 15 years old.  I decided it was sucking up too much electricity.  And it was a bit small.  And it was the only white appliance in the kitchen.

So I bought a newer more energy-efficient one about 5-6 years ago (maybe longer, time is fuzzy sometimes).  I liked it.  And it probably paid for itself in energy-saving.

And had them move the old one to the basement as a sort of root cellar.  Set it to 45F for storing garden and bird seeds, sodas, potatoes, bulk stuff like that which didn't have to be seriously chilled.  Since it was seldom opened, the energy-inefficiency wasn't much of a problem.  

But I did keep the freezer portion at 0F because I stored bulk meat there.  Individual meal portions of cooked chicken, pork, and shrimp; raw beef, all in individual zip-lock bags and each in its own larger shoebox-size plastic container.

Well, the shrimp come frozen, chicken and pork seem to come out fine (and safer) pre-cooked, but I want to cook the steaks rather individually at dinnertime.  And the old fridge had a top freezer which was convenient for seeing all the large container labels.

But I got tired of the newer kitchen freezer being at the bottom.  When I prepare bulk stuff like stews, spaghetti sauce, soups, etc, there were all these small one-meal containers loose in the bottom and it was awkward to find anything specific.  So on days when I didn't feel like making something new, I would just reach in and pull out a leftover.

I was willing to be surprised.  It was "Oh, I'm having hot sausage/cannelini bean/onion/tomato stew tonight.  Sometimes, you can't really tell what something is until you thaw it out, LOL!  But the small containers kept falling around when I pulled the bottom freezer drawer out and I had to keep re-stacking them.

So I decided the old basement refrigerator had to go.  My electric co-op offered a fee pickup of old appliances and offerred a $50 rebate.  So earlier this year I called them about that.  They said they had ended the rebate program.  So I figured I would have to pay to get it hauled away and moved it out of the way.

Meanwhile I bought a newer even more energy-efficient top freezer fridge.  But just before delivery, I realized it was too tall for the kitchen.  By 1/4"...  So it ended up as the new basement fridge.  Which actually works out.

I moved all the large basement top fridge meat containers to the bottom kitchen freezer.  The sliding drawer makes it easy to open the front of the large containers to pull out a frozen bag from the labelled containers.  And all the loose small containers went to the top fridge basement freezer.  No drawers there, so they don't fall over when stacked now.

And I mentioned all that to say that I discovered my electric co-op re-started their appliance pickup and rebate program!

They came and took away the really old fridge on Sept 5...

Goodbye old fridge, I am glad to see you go!  And good news is that it will be taken apart and recycled.