Refrigerator dial mishap...lost 30 racks of ribs

Kind of a rough morning to be honest. I had 30 racks of ribs stored in my chest refrigerator to be cooked for a lunch service today (BBQ food truck). I had the smoker fired up and went to grab the ribs out of the refrigerator and they were warm to the touch...felt like I had been kicked in the family jewels. I temped them just to be sure and they were at 55° internally. I even opened the cryovac just to make sure they were bad and was immediately hit with the smell of spoiled food. :sad:

Not only am I out roughly $250, but with nothing open overnight anymore, I'm missing another day of work. With Covid likely coming back and the 2nd wave of shutdowns already starting in some areas, I was really hoping to get in as much work as possible for the rest of this month and early into November.

For a refrigerator I've got a chest freezer which I run through a "kill switch" style external control. So essentially it's a chest freezer which functions as a large refrigerator...awesome in terms of storage. For the last 2 years this hasn't failed me a single time, but somehow the dial got messed up and instead of running between 35-40°, it was running between 55-60°. I've turned it back to where it's supposed to be and it's now it's running just fine...I think my cats might have messed with it because I refused to overfeed them. haha

I bought the RT-801 refrigerator / freezer thermometer from Thermoworks this morning. I've been looking at one for a while because I always had a feeling something like this would happen. The RT-801 pretty much acts just like a Thermoworks Smoke in that you can set high / low temps with alarms, so it should stop me from losing food in the future.

I hope everyone is having a better day than me! :mrgreen:

Thanks @TC Smoke & Que. Sorry to hear that you've had a similar experience as it can really put a strain on things.

jasonjax said:

That absolutely sucks.

I had a similar issue, but not on a retail scale. I had some very expensive Wagyu in our freezer as well as a year's worth of venison. Wife accidentally left the freezer door ajar. Lost most of the freezer's contents.

Since then I use a sensor push and it has saved me at least one other time already by sending an alert to my phone when the freezer wasn't shut and the temp was rising. Worth every penny!

https://www.sensorpush.com/

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Ouch...that sounds horrible. As bad as my morning has been it's a cakewalk to losing that much meat and especially when talking about Wagyu.

That Sensor Push looks like a cool product and thanks for the recommendation.

Burnt at Both Endz said:

Fark! Sorry to hear about the mishap, I run the same type of setup on a chest freezer, has me wondering if I should get a backup temp sensor.

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The RT-801 is $20 from Thermoworks. Right now I've got my Smoke in there which I'm going to use to monitor the temps until the 801 shows up. It's not a bad idea to have a backup just in case.

Here's the link if you're curious.
https://www.thermoworks.com/RT801