Freezer meltdown advice please.

[DeanElderberry]

My fridge freezer is about 20yo, and is in the process of conking out. The freezer bit got as 'warm' as -5 for a couple of hours on Wednesday (my bad, I hadn't pushed the door fully closed), and has been hovering between -7 and -8 since. I have just transferred most of the contents to the emergency freezer in the garage - it had been off and needed time to get down to temperature.

Everything was hard and non-smelly.

I'll ditch obviously dodgy stuff like mystery bowls of what and bags of undated stock and goo when the organic bin is collected. I'll also ditch some seafood that I know has been in there for quite a long time.

But is other stuff likely to be safe if I eat in the next couple of weeks? I have some pork from a pal's free-range organic pigs and it would make me very sad to waste it. But it would also make me sad to get food poisoning.

I don't know how quickly the replacement will be delivered, I've been measuring available space.

What a pain OP especially in this hot weather. I really wouldn't risk using any meat, fish or dairy products left from the freezer. Hopefully your new freezer arrives soon.
In the meantime check your home insurance which may cover some of the freezer contents.

I wouldn't re-freeze anything that looked like it had started to thaw. If the pork was frozen raw then I'd take the risk, as long as it was heated to a high temperature when you cook it.

When ours died anything that had gone in raw and started to defrost was defrosted and cooked, then bunged in the new freezer or eaten. And yep, agree that it's a great time to get rid of the random unlabelled tubs of mystery!

Defrost meat etc. fully, cook what you can and refreeze it in whatever freezer is available.

It is very safe to do this.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health/can-previously-frozen-thawed-and-cooked-food-be-refrozen

As PP, your insurance should pay out.
When it happened to me, I was paid the commercial price of all my home cooked meals as well as replacement costs of everything else.

It probably sounds daft, but I changed from my usual insurer to a new one just two weeks ago, and I'd be embarrassed to claim so soon! And in all honesty, I knew it was an old freezer and had been trying to reduce the contents anyway. There's the pork (chops and slab of belly) and a couple of bags of pasta sauce, one of stew, some sausagemeat, a ridiculous number of half bags of grated cheese, some soft fruit from the garden (this year's is coming in, the old stuff can go out for the birds).

Ice cream, packages of veg can go.

I'm making resolutions about labelling and lists. Very good resolutions. Excellent.

I'll go into the shop first thing tomorrow and get started on the replacement.

I refreeze frozen cheese and frozen fruit (that have defrosted) all the time. We are still here kicking away!