Many times, house owners ask me if I can tell them the quickest, most effective, most efficient, most natural way to clean out one of those big garage freezers.
I like this question because this is one of the tasks nobody likes to do, and if you want to hire a house cleaner, you can pay them extra $250, and they can do this project for you. But if you want to do it yourself, it’ll take about three or four hours.
So, if you have three or four hours to do this, I’ll show you the easiest, fastest and most efficient way to do it. You need something. Because you will make it manually. You will need a biscuit or a baking sheet, so that you can wrap the ice on it.
The other thing you need is a towel because after melting the ice, you’ll have to clean the bottom of it. Unless you have a drain on the bottom, you can hang on the garden hose, and you can let it drain naturally.
Another thing you need is a little cooler to put your food inside while the refrigerator itself is defrosting. If you pay someone to do this, you want to make sure you understand that you want to throw out expired food or reschedule the menu. If you are a house cleaner and you have been paid to do it, be sure to ask your customers this question. You don’t want to throw away food.
Firstly, you have to clean the surface around the fridge. Let’s take it out because if it’s still plugged in, nothing good happens, because nothing will melt.
So now you choose a beautiful day outside your garage, where the sun shines, it’s a good time for you to go ahead and defrost the refrigerator.
Now, it is a good time. If you are the owner of the house, decide what food you want to eat in the coming weeks or days, because this allows you to defrost them, and then use them. You’re recycling food from your refrigerator.
Well, now that you’ve unplugged your refrigerator, you’ve taken out all the food, now there’s only one big, thick empty fridge. I know it’ll take a while to melt.
Now, if the outside is a beautiful day, you have time to let it melt naturally. All the food is already in the cooler. As it’s frozen, it will stay cold for several hours. So, you can do something else.
Now, if you’re in a hurry, let’s say you’re a house cleaner, you’re in the customer’s house, you have no choice in three or four hours. In such a situation, you can get a hairdryer.
Make sure to insert the hairdryer into the grounding cable in the GFI socket, and you want to make sure that the cable does not get wet. You can blow a hairdryer into the fridge. It still takes 30 to 40 minutes to do this if the ice is super thick.
If you melt the ice with a hairdryer or let it defrost naturally, it turns into a piece of loose ice. When it’s that kind of Louvre, you want to take a rubber spatula, you want to give it a push, make sure you don’t scratch the little wiring, or the tube inside the fridge because if you do, you can damage them.
That’s one of the reasons we use a rubber spatula because we do not want to spoil the scratches of the elements of the refrigerator.
Once you’ve loosened everything, don’t put it on the sidewalk, or if you’re in the driveway, you can throw it into the driveway. Well, once you’ve cleaned the whole refrigerator, you want to take the towel, you want to wait for all the loose things. Extra water comes out, so now it’s clean.
Before you are ready to repack the refrigerator, it’s a perfect time to disinfect the inside of the freezer, as there can be a lot of germs and bacteria. Although it’s just the eyes, there may be some contamination or bacteria out there. Use bacterial eliminators, which can be like vinegar and water, a little washing soap to clean.
So when you’re ready to bring your food back, my advice is, if you have a plastic box with a lid, use it the way it’s easier to put things like in a chemical lab to store and stack well, rather than having random packages of different sizes that move together.
