I know this sounds like a silly thing to think about in the winter, but have you ever considered saving money by storing ice? It really can work in the right circumstances.
Last year, we had to buy another chest freezer to store homestead-grown turkeys. I feared that we’d be hurting for freezer space, but as it turned out, didn’t overflow the 16-cubic-foot freezer with the turkeys. That meant that we ended up with something that’s very precious to most folks — space in deep freezes.
At one point, I had considered consolidating my small chest freezer with my larger one, but I thought I wouldn’t be left with much wiggle room, so I just left well enough alone for a while.
I hadn’t given the whole freezer situation much thought until I was getting ice this morning. We have a plumbed ice maker in our kitchen freezer that makes amazing ice from reverse osmosis filtered water. We use a little each day for things like iced coffee or the occasional cold beverage, but for the most part, the ice just sits in the bin taking up space.
This morning, I noticed that the situation had gotten so bad that there was a large chunk of ice cubes that were preventing new cubes from moving to the front of the bin. I got ice for my iced coffee, and then I pulled the entire bin out of the freezer. I retrieved the ice chunk, and I plopped it into a freezer zipper bag. Then, I started thinking.
A month or two ago, I heard a little snippet on The Survival Podcast from a guy who was talking about saving money by storing ice. His rationale went something like this. He didn’t use much ice in the winter, but he ended up buying ice in the summer. Like me, he had freezer space available, so he bought “reusable” ice bags from Amazon, and he started filling them with excess winter ice. By storing that ice, he was paying less to run his freezers (because it costs more money to keep air cold), and he ended up with plenty of ice come summertime. Yes, he bought bags, but the savings made it worth it.
Like I said before, we don’t use a lot of ice around here, but we do end up buying ice during the summer. In the past, I’ve stored ice in zipper bags, but they can only hold so much ice, and they don’t hold up over time.
While I put today’s ice in a zipper bag to solve my immediate problem, the whole situation reminded me that I can store ice and save money. Bonus!