Next to your heating oven, sudsing dishwasher, and cycling laundry machine, the refrigerator plays a pretty passive role, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important in your household. In fact, it might be one of the most important appliances on the grid, being responsible for keeping your food salmonella, e-coli, and botulinum-free. Unless you want to pay hundreds each month on takeout, a functional fridge is a fundamental fixture for a well-fed family. Plus, it keeps your wine chilled!
It’s important that you keep your fridge running, and equally important that you use it in a healthy manner. In this post, our KitchenAid, Bosch, Whirlpool, and Jenn-Air fridge repair experts share 6 “best practices” for fridge use to ensure that your family food supply stays safe.
- Keep raw meat on the lower shelves. Next time you’re on dinner dethaw duty, make sure that you keep that hunk of meat grounded on the fridge’s lowest shelf. If you place it up higher, bacteria-laden meat juices could seep and drip onto the food below it, putting your family at risk. Additionally, make sure that you put all thawing meat in a bag, bowl, or pan to minimize the need for post-thaw cleanup.
- Don’t overstuff your fridge. It feels good to open a fridge brimming with food, but it’s not the best approach. Stuffing your fridge to the gills can actually limit its effectiveness by interfering with the cold air circulation. Furthermore, an overstuffed fridge is usually a disorganized fridge, which makes spoiled food and rank appliance odours much more likely.
- Don’t overclock your fridge temperature. One of the most preventable causes of fridge damage has to do with keeping the temperature in the danger zone. If your fridge is running round-the-clock to keep its contents unnecessarily cold, you’re giving yourself a bigger energy bill for no reason. Furthermore, overclocking it in this way will reduce your fridge’s lifespan considerably. That said, the temperature setting needs to be cool enough to fight off bacteria. Any fridge running above 40 F is too warm to do its job.
- Don’t store fruits and vegetables in the same crisper. This is a common mistake that people make when trying to save space, and it’s a costly one! Keeping your fruits and vegetables in the same crisper will cause them to spoil faster. This is because fruit emits a gas called ethylene, which is known to hasten the vegetable spoiling process.
- Don’t store eggs in the sculpted shelving. This may be tough to wrap your head around; after all, those sculpted shelf slots hold your eggs so perfectly! Unfortunately, the fridge door is a “hot spot” that shouldn’t be used to store spoil-prone food items like eggs and dairy. Instead, you’ll want to push the carton towards the back of the fridge where it’s coolest. This will increase their shelf life (pun intended), and help you avoid any Humpty-Dumpty situations when you open the fridge in a feeding frenzy.
Don’t neglect your fridge repair responsibilities. Many fridge breakdowns occur when minor repairs are neglected. If you feel that your fridge is making strange noises, running harder than it should be, leaking, or smelling a little funky, don’t hesitate to schedule a checkup. At Ottawa Pro Appliance Repair, our KitchenAid, Bosch, Whirlpool, and Jenn-Air fridge repair experts will be happy to give you a free quote – just call (888)-508-8270 today!
