Buying a New Freezer
If you must have a stand alone freezer, here are some factors for you to consider:
 Top-loading chest freezers are 10-25% more efficient than the front-loading uprights because the cold air, which sinks, stays inside rather than spilling out when the door is opened. But bear in mind that you will have to be more organized to get the most out of the chest model. Spending 10 minutes rearranging the frozen dinners to find the Popsicles will waste a bit of your precious electricity.
Just as with refrigerators, manual defrost freezers use less electricity than automatic ones, but only if you defrost the manual ones regularly. Once its coils ice up more than one-quarter of an inch, you're using more energy to run the manual model.
Despite the need to defrost, you might find a manual model suits you better than one with automatic defrost. Most people open the freezer much less often than they do the refrigerator so frost builds up less quickly in the freezer. Plus, manual defrosters tend to store food better since they do not dehydrate frozen food the way automatic defrosters do. There are more manual defrost freezers than refrigerators available, too, so you have a better chance of finding a manual defrost model that suits your needs than a manual defrost refrigerator.
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