Upright Freezers

An Upright, or Vertical freezer as it is also commonly known as, has a single door which opens just like a fridge. Inside you’ll mostly find either shelves with clear compartments or shelves with pull-out drawers like the Westinghouse freezers - or with the addition of a twist ice dispenser like in some Hisense Upright freezers.

Some purely have top-to-bottom clear compartment storage to separate your pre-cooked freezer meals from your vacuum-sealed uncooked meats or bags of frozen veg like in the ChiQ freezers, so depending on what you’re storing and how much of it, Upright freezers can be really handy for grouping certain food types for an organised space.

With their helpful layout, Upright freezers make it easy to both put away and reach for items to assist in everyday cooking, baking or defrosting  At The Good Guys we have small bar freezers at just 86 litres through to larger Upright freezers around the 380 litre usable capacity mark.

Besides their helpful layout for quick accessibility and freezer organisation, Upright freezers are frost free so that’s a huge plus when you consider upkeep and maintenance. With no frost build up, there’s no need to empty out your freezer and perform a draining function.

Some Upright freezers like the ChiQ freezers are a hybrid, that is, you can switch between freezer or fridge settings which is perfect for those weeks where you have more fresh foods than frozen and need that added fridge space. Aesthetics wise you can find stainless steel or white, while functionally, reversible doors mean you can set your Upright freezer to open to the left or to the right.

For optimal storage, many Upright freezers have intelligent cooling systems with constant air flow as well as settings to accelerate the freezing process via electronic temperature control, which is usually accessible via a front LED display (handy to set before heading out for some bargain-buy ice cream).

While Upright freezers allow for quick access to everyday frozen foods, Chest freezers are more about longer term storage. With a Chest freezer, you need to bend down to grab items and depending on how much is in there, this is not always easy. Chest freezers however do a great job of snap-freezing fresh foods and deep freezing them.

As we’ve seen, Upright freezers can assist in freezer organisation, however in a Chest freezer, you’ll need to do most of the heavy lifting with your own stacking and sorting (the inclusion of freezer baskets in some models can assist). Unlike their counterpart, Chest freezers require manual defrosting via their drainage outlet and their temperature needs to be controlled via a manual dial rather than electronically.

Consider what you’ll be storing, how much of it, how often you’ll be reaching for it and how much physical space you have when deciding between these two freezer types. For the largest freezer volume available, a Chest freezer like the ones from Haier are your best bet.

When you consider that most Upright freezers have lower usable volumes and an Energy Rating of 3 to 3.5 Stars compared to some larger capacity Chest freezers with a 4 Star Energy Rating, Upright freezers can cost more to run 24/7.

All in all, though, it’s important to stick to the usable capacity that suits your living requirements to ensure optimal energy consumption - there's no use going for a larger volume model if you don't need all that space. Choose the standalone freezer type with the usable litre capacity that will be of most benefit to your household.

Remember to always compare freezer models of the same type and usable capacity to get a like-for-like understanding on the energy efficiency of the one you’re keen on, and then gauge what the average annual running cost will be by referring to the Australian Government’s Energy Rating site.