Wow. That is a surprising number: "An ENERGY STAR certified chest freezer uses about 215 kWh of electricity and costs about $30 per year to run, while an ENERGY STAR certified upright freezer uses about 395 kWh of electricity and costs about $60 per year to run."
When you open the chest freezer, you don't have cold air "spilling" out of it. It remains in the chest.
On the other hand, when you open a freezer that has a door on the front, a substantial portion of the cold air spills out of it.
When freezers are coupled with refrigerators, the way that many of them work is by having the freezer air descend into the refrigerator through baffles (which again, makes the freezer work to cool the air that was exchanged with the refrigerator).
If it's a freezer you use often, it's worth considering upright, because you want to be able to see, access and use most of the freezer, instead of just the top.
Add to it small humans who may do the same and the $30/year in electricity differences can be dwarfed by the benefits of having a freezer contain meal prep, etc.
Combining a small standup freezer with something like a Foodsaver is an easy win to reduce waste / thrown away groceries, as well as helping with off-season wishes.
Buying less from the inflation fuelling large grocery stores is something that is well within reach.
Chest freezers are less convenient to access, and require different accommodation than an upright refrigerator.
In a chest freezer:
- You access everything from the top. This would require something like a section of cabinetry which opens to the top, or a chest freezer occupying kitchen or other living space. Since the freezer is low and wide, this has a larger floor footprint than an upright fridge.
- Contents are stacked vertically, which means you have to dig through the pile to get to items on the bottom. There might be designs which make this easier (e.g., fold-up shelving), but that would have to accommodate another aspect which is that ...
- Chest freezers tend to frost over fairly heavily. Cold air doesn't spill out, but warm air tends to settle down into the fridge, and as it chills, loses its humidity as frost. Many or most chest freezers don't have an automatic defrost cycle,[1] and frost will build up on inside walls, contents, and any moving parts such as the fold-up shelving I'd described. Defrosting is typically done manually with chest freezers.
- Chest freezers are, well, freezers. I suspect some might be able to operate as refrigerators, but AFAIU they tend to cool somewhat unevenly as refrigerators rely on active air circulation to cool contents and avoid hot or cold spots.
If you're aware of these limitations and/or can work around them, e.g., by having a trundle-shelf or top-access countertop to address floorspace / footprint issues, and can find a way to easily access contents, chest-type designs can be a good choice.
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Notes:
1. Refrigerator defrost cycles involve halting the cooling cycle and activating heating elements in the refrigerator (and freezer-space) walls to melt any accumulated frost. This itself is both a considerable energy expenditure, and tends to accelerate freezer burn and other ageing of food often giving unpleasant taste or texture.
We have two chest freezers and an upright freezer. The chest freezers outlast the upright freezer, and there's no shelves* to get in the way of optimal packing.
*However, you have to unpack when you want something from the bottom. This is why we have an upright freezer. We store cheese curds from our dairy in it, and we want to access them quickly and easily and regularly. Also we use ice packs for shipping, and the shelves make it easy to freeze ice packs flat.
And it can easily become essentially a black hole. Not that that doesn’t happen with my upright too. I’m split on whether I shouldn’t just have bought a chest freezer when I bought my spare freezer.
https://www.energystar.gov/products/freezers