Questions about Freezer acting weird

[Terri_A]

I'm posting this on Great Food since my freezer relates to food.

In the past few months I've noticed that I will occasionally go into my garage freezer and find ice - as if there was water dripping in and it froze....any ideas? Do I need a repairman?

[Gumbeaux]

Do you have automatic defrost? This causes thawing and refreezing.

Ice buildup can also be caused by power outages or the door being left open. I defrosted my MIL's freezer this weekend with a blow dryer to get rid of ice buildup.

[krhm]

I've had that happen, and it turned out that someone had left the door partially open.

If that doesn't seem like a good possibility, though, is there anything else going on?

One thing we learned to do: freeze an oddly shaped bowl of water. Take the ice out of the bowl and place it in a ziploc bag. If you ever have a power outage or anything like that again, you can tell how bad it was by how much the shape of the ice cube has changed. The worst time, I had a flat bag of ice, so I knew it had been out for a while, enough for everything to thaw.

[vabelle35]

I've been researching fridge/freezer issues because mine is doing strange things.

I've come across a lot of info on refrigerators and freezers that are in people's garages. It has to do with the change in outside temperature. It impacts the garage units more than in house units because garage units see a major change in the outside air temperature whereas indoor units do not. So the compressor doesn't work the same or turn on/off the same because it gets confused.

Does that make sense?