JohnB. wrote:As I posted we had to have the door ajar to get a mid 20°F temp rise in our 17 year old 21 cu ft Frigidaire. I cleared the high/low reads on the temp monitor yesterday & will see where it goes this week. After 16 hours max temp was 8.9°F/51% humidity. Dropped back to -1°F/38% & settled in at 4°F/43% which is where I normally see it. Like yours the freezer is full, no ice or frost showing.

There should be a high/low differential between when the compressor is switched on/off. If you're reading a "settled" value that means your temperature monitor isn't reporting the fluctuations for whatever reason. So who knows what that means with regard to the brief high temperature that occurs during defrost.

Maybe your controller dampens out fast changes. Or maybe it's due to the probe location. I moved my probe yesterday and the defrost cycle ended when the temperature was 6°F.

Even if your freezer does have a lower defrost cycle max air temperature that doesn't mean that mid-20s is "wrong" somehow. There are tradeoffs with regard to cost and efficiency. From a practical perspective, our freezer maintains food as well as any freezer I've ever used, if not better. Probably you can say the same about your freezer even though you for some reason have it set at a temperature above what is recommended. If I were going to be worried about it I'd focus on the 23+ hours a day your freezer is warmer than mine instead of the 30 minutes that maybe it's colder.

But I'm not worried.

mbeck wrote:Frozen beans, directly into the grinder. Temp from my probe thermometer, post grind, in the catch cup: 62.1F. Ambient temperature 68F. Niche grinder, at 20 for a light-medium roast espresso.

Same beans, same dose weight, same grind, same ambient temperature, but letting them sit for half an hour before grinding: 81.2F. Beans no longer felt cold to touch before grinding. The shot ran faster, but honestly there are too many variables in my prep and machine to trust shot time. And clearly overall YMMV.

I embedded a probe in my basket and made comparisons there, right before I locked in. The difference between slightly warmer than room temperature beans and a pre-weighed dose of beans straight from the -18°C freezer was a whopping 1°C/2°F. I have a Kinu hand grinder which means a minute or so of grinding at relatively low RPM. And of course the basket is going to moderate the difference to some extent as well.

But for me it means that the freezer probably doesn't have an important impact on shot temperature.