> you don’t do that (aka keep it on), there is far less total heat to move, unless you’d have it sit so long that you’d get the same total heat transfer. I thi

> you don’t do that (aka keep it on), there is far less total heat to move, unless you’d have it sit so long that you’d get the same total heat transfer. I think you're a little confused. I'm a little lost at even how to minimally explain it to you. The rate at which heat leaks into the refrigerator declines as the refrigerator heats up, so this metric too improves with time. > Which if the insulation is good, may take many weeks. Implausible. "Many weeks"? The best 20 cu ft refrigerators use about 375 kilowatt-hours per year according to energystar.gov. At a coefficient of performance of 10, that's an average of 400W flowing into the fridge and needing to be removed by the refrigerator. At 20K of temperature difference, that's about 20W/degK. The contents will warm very quickly, absent phase change. Having ice in there will slow things down until the ice melts; then it will warm very quickly. The typical numbers cited say you have 2-3 days with a full freezer without power before things have mostly thawed and become unsafe-- this is well over half of the way to room temperature in terms of energy budget (and in the best case of a full freezer where there's the most thermal mass inside). (Specific heat capacity of water ~4200 J/(kg*k); heat of fusion of water ~334000 J/(kg*k)). None of this changes the energy balance of the problem, though.