Summer time is tough for freezers. Elevated room temperatures make them work hard to keep your stored samples and reagents at -20°C or -80°C.
Here are five simple tricks to protect your samples from thawing while saving energy:
- Remove ice: Make sure you defrost it regularly. The more ice your freezer has in it, the more energy it uses. If the ice around the inside is more than 1cm thick, you need to defrost it.
- Let air circulate: Make sure your freezer has plenty of room around it for air to circulate, and keep it away from any external sources of heat, including direct sunlight.
- Take away the dust: Check the condenser coils for dust – this reduces their efficiency, so if they are dusty, turn the fridge-freezer off and give them a quick clean.
- Check the doors: Make sure that the seals on the door are working properly. If you have condensation on the outside of your fridge-freezer, that’s a sure sign that you need to get the seals replaced.
- Remove expired stuff: Get rid of outdated or poorly labels samples. Freezers work more effective when they are not overcrowded.
Keep an overview of what is inside your fridge. Digital inventory management databases like FLUICS CONNECT help to keep track of what is inside the freezers with only a few clicks!
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Don’t miss the chance to give your freezer a treat and get published in Nature. Sign up at freezerchallenge.org and submit a report of your lab’s efforts to save energy before August 1, 2020.
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