Domestic Macho
I’m apparently in loser mode right now, having spent the early afternoon defrosting my freezer instead of frolicking in the frozen wasteland that’s NYC right now (denizens of Minnesota and similar places need not point out that it’s actually not that cold in the city right now; it just feels cold, since I lost my gloves on the LIRR yesterday, and I still don’t have a good hat). This was a necessary thing: I have an old, crappy fridge that probably can’t be moved out and replaced without tearing up the entire kitchen. I’m reconciled with the fact that this fridge will be with me for the life of this apartment, a sort of bad human-appliance marriage that can’t be ended without greater suffering.
Remember those little cube fridges everyone had in their college dorms? You remember how iced up the big-enough-for-one-popsicle freezer compartment used to get because there was no insulation or moisture-proofing between it and the rest of the box? Well, my grown-up fridge is just like that: the freezer is on top, and sits more or less exposed to the elements. Ice builds up just like in the dorm fridges, but, since this is a more mature appliance, it builds up not merely a-SnoCone-for-little-Joe’s worth of ice, but frozen-daquiris-on-the-house quantities. Some parts had an inch-and-a-half of ice when I got started.
Being far too infatuated with the Net, I went and did some searches for tips on defrosting freezers. A nice search engine is being developed by a couple of guys at Stanford right now, google.com. Salon actually had an article on them here.
Without too much fuss, I rediscovered Learn2.com, a nifty site that shows you how to do various mundane tasks. The “defrost freezer” lesson is here. Their tricks are to have a pot of boiling water that you can place in the freezer compartment, causing the ice to melt a bit and spall into good sized chunks. Less melt-off water to deal with if you can take the ice out by hand rather than bail it out by bucket. This is actually more important for my project, since, because the fridge is in the corner near the window sill, I actually can’t open the fridge door all the way, thereby preventing me from pulling out the melt-off tray. Any water that builds up has to be sponged out (though, way back when I first moved in, there was a fair amount of water, so I went tot he hardware store, bought some plastic tubing, and siphoned out enough of the mess to get in there with a sponge).
Let me tell you, there’s nothing more satisfying than being able to pull out large chunks of ice. Well, there are more satisfying things, but not in this context.
One thing I’d add to the Learn2.com guide: get some thick rubber gloves. You’ll be able to deal with the cold much better, and you can actually put a dish towel into boiling water and pull it out by hand. It makes this sort of task easier and more comfortable.
There were some touchy moments, when I realized how much ice had actually built up _above_ the freezer compartment, and along the far side, where I can’t really reach because the door is in the way. But the vigorous prodding of a long chopstick to push the loose ice over to where I could get to it solved that.
All in all, the whole project took a little more than an hour. My stowed-away butter didn’t even melt, though I’ll argue that the weather helped a bit. Doing this in a 90-degree apartment wouldn’t be pleasant. (The last time I defrosted the freezer was this impromptu exercise over the summer. Power had apparently gone out for a day or so, and all the accumulated ice had melted into the run-off tray. Then the power came back on, and there was a huge block of ice in said tray. I discovered this around 11PM one evening, when faced with soggy ice cream and a bit too much water everywhere else in the fridge. About two hours of vigorous hacking with butter knives and the application of hot water allowed me to pry out enough chunks to angle the rest of the block so that I could pull it out of the tray in one big piece. Never again.)
Of course, these trials and tribulations are probably lost to a majority of you, who live with the wonders of frost-free refridgerators.
Well, it’s Miller time now.