question about freezers

Usually a few hours should do the trick. We are not operating a freezer room, so a few hours should be more than sufficient to get going. As a test, leave a glass of water in the freezer when you plug it in. And you can use this glass of water as your indicator. If it freezes into ice, then your fridge is more than ready to take in your frozen food for storage.

It uses less energy if you keep it fuller. When we moved I just put stuff into it immediately, even though it was not cold inside. The other frozen foods helped keep it cold, so nothing thawed. For awhile we didn't really have enough to go in there, so I put everything in my regular freezer, and unplugged the chest freezer for awhile. It's senseless to use it if you can't keep it full, it wastes too much energy.

If the thing came with a manual then it should say in there. Id say having it on 24 hours would have it cold enough to freeze the items in there and keep them good.

A surefire way to know is, after a few hours, put your tongue on one of the shelves. If it sticks, it's cold enough. I'm joking, of course. I honestly don't know how long it would take but I doubt it would be even 24 hours. I'm sure it will be cold enough after a few hours, as long as you don't keep opening it to see if it's cold enough. I'm going to buy a chest freezer. After reading about the two kinds, I learned that the upright kind warm up rather quickly when you open the door while the chest type doesn't. That's because cold air falls, warm air rises. With the chest types, the cold air can't fall. But, to give the upright kind their due, my mother had an upright freezer for many, many years and never had a problem with anything thawing because the door was opened.

Hm... Thats a good question. I know it takes DAYS for a large fridge to THAW, I don't think I want to know how long it takes it to freeze enough to be ready for storage of food...