Afternoon all. I have a stand alone garage / workshop with brick walls, wooden cladding, corrugated roof and concrete floors. There is currently no heating to this building and it doesn't attach to the house.
We use it for our fridge freezer which didn't fit through the house front door, and the washing machine.
When winter kicks in, will the fridge freezer inevitably have problems when the garage gets colder? If so, what is the best approach to remedy this? Can I insulate the fridge freezer itself? Is there any point to insulating the garage without adding in some kind of heater too?
The fridge/freezer will probably stop working below a certain temperature. How low it will work depends on what refrigerant it uses: if the ambient temperature goes much below the boiling point of the refrigerant then it will probably stop.
For the fridge part this probably won't be too much of an issue since, if the temperature is low enough to stop the cooler from working, it's probably also low enough that your food will be just fine with no extra cooling. But for the freezer it might be more of a drama.
For what it's worth, I had my fridge, freezer and washing machine in a (mostly) unheated shed last winter and nothing disastrous happened. If I remember right the fridge did shut down when the ambient temperature got too low but it didn't seem to come to any harm as a result. I don't recall the freezer being affected in any noticeable way. The most annoying thing was, unless we were scrupulous about draining the washing machine after each use, it would tend to freeze solid and require a lengthy thawing-out session next time we wanted to use it.
Insulating the garage would indeed be worthwhile even without a heater, if you can afford the materials to do it: even just partial insulation would be better than nothing. Insulating the fridge itself might be tricky since it does need some way to reject the heat from the condenser. You'd need to insulate it just enough to stop it freezing but not so much that it cooks.
