we bought an upright and love it. in a chest freezer, stuff is hiding.

Chest freezers are actually a little better at freezing if you're using them to freeze and hold. That is, for whole animals, stock, etc. The tops can be ajar too, however. If you're concerned you could add an outer latch, or use the key, to make sure the freezer is sealed.

Upright freezers with freezer coil shelves are next best, and better for frozen foods (whether homemade or bought) that you want to be able to see and sort through. Finding what you're looking for fast and getting the door closed fast is what's important. Upright freezers with wire shelves and no coils aren't so good at freezing, though they'll hold frozen okay.

Manual defrost is better for holding frozen food longer, though I'm told the high end freezers with evaporators are just as good. I have a new one of those and am not sure I'm convinced, though I haven't had it long enough to be really sure. The high end freezers also have door alarms.

A manual defrost chest freezer is the most economical to run. Cold air falls, so when an upright is open, all the chilled air inside is falling out.

There are now self-defrosting chest freezers. I saw some at Sears several years ago. Didn't examine them especially closely, but they appeared to have a recirculating-air cooling system with evaporator fan like an upright freezer or a refrigerator.

Oh plllog, your comment about a chest freezer being best for "whole animals" brought back a memory. A work colleague of mine kept her German Shepherd in her chest freezer when it died during the winter, when the ground was much too frozen to dig a hole and bury it.

ick o la cooksnews!!

I have had both and though they say the chest is more economical to run I know the chest was opened a lot longer to find anything so I doubt it was anymore economical to run. My last one was a chest and it had an alarm if the door was left open.

I agree. ICK. But practical, I guess. I kept trying to make sides of beef and dressed game into a less meandering sentence and came up with something a little too compact, I guess.

Eandhl, hit on the thing about chests: they're great if you have large chunks in there, but not so great for looking for popsicles that have fallen out of the box. But you're also less likely to find the kids standing in front of an open chest freezer looking at the food and expecting it to magically jump onto the stove and nourish them.

"Manual defrost is better for holding frozen food longer, though I'm told the high end freezers with evaporators are just as good."""

What would a high end freezer be?

Anyways, good points all. With a chest freezer, you will also need more vertical space.

IMHO a better question may be? Manual or defrost? Manual freezers are cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, and food will last longer.

'high-end' would be one with automatic defrost, or frost-free.

With a chest freezer, you need to organize things. My Mom used boxes and kept like items in each box. Anything cooked from the garden was marked as to what it was.

Manual freezers are simple. But you need to plan ahead for a defrost cycle. And it needs a drain plug.

I didn't mean what Weedmeister said. I meant high end like Miele and SubZero, and probably the top of other lines.

Automatic defrost, self defrost, and other traditional style freezers raise the temperature in the freezer box to just above freezing in order to melt and drain the frost.

The high end ones, nowadays, have an evaporator that's supposed to dry out the freezer box so that frost can't form in the first place. That way you aren't supposed to get freezer burn from the warming of items. Instead, they have a super cool setting so that when you put in a bunch of things to freeze, the temperature inside comes up to good and frozen instead of to starting to thaw. I'm not sure that going from supercold to still good and frozen doesn't also mess with the texture of the food. I have a new Miele. I'm not convinced that it will be as good for long term storage as my old GE upright manual with the coil shelves. Time will tell.

It seems to me that the key, no matter what you get, is to keep the freezer closed. :)

FWIW, I just bought a new Frigidaire upright freezer. Most of their models (above the 2 or 3 cheapest ones) seem to have both a ''door-ajar'' alarm and a lock.