Glad to help.. I don't think 41 will be cold enough. At least not to preserve the food for more than a day or two max. You really need to get down into the mid 30's.
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We really do not recommend keeping our foods thawed in the refrigerator for more than 24 hours. Upon thawing the food ingredients, particularly the beneficial fats (omega 3/6 fatty acids) start to break down over the course of hours and certainly days. If you are taking a food such as LRS and keeping it in the fridge for 5-7 days it is likely on the verge of spoiling by the end of that week. Let me explain it in a chronological fashion to help better understand what I am trying to convey. We have the luxury of getting fresh seafood delivered twice a week from sources very close to the Carolinas. Let's for a moment take a look at one single ingredient which has a very direct path from the ocean to our doorstep, the common shrimp. When we place our order for fresh shrimp (when in season) the shrimp arrive at our shop at 9:00am Monday morning. (We get another delivery on Thursday too) These shrimp were typically harvested the later half of the week prior and the boats come it to be offloaded on Friday or Saturday. My wholesaler calls me every Friday to confirm the order for how many hundreds of pounds we need that week. So for the sake of argument lets say the shrimp in our delivery were lifted from the water on Thursday, packed in the hull of the boat where they remained stored until being unloaded at the wholesaler over the weekend, then transported to us on Monday. That is a pretty direct and short transit time for that ingredient which also gets delivered to the numerous restaurants in our city after my delivery stop.
Monday is our biggest shipping day so we typically only run food production on Tues-Saturday. So it is not uncommon for that shrimp which was harvested last Friday to be stored in our cooler at 38 degrees until the next Tuesday-Thursday when it becomes processed into an LRS blend. It is then rapidly frozen in our commercial freezer at -30 in the retail package. So that single shrimp took 5-7 days to go from the ocean to the pack of LRS. (Bear in mind that this is a best case scenario with a dedicated food manufacture working within 4 hours of the coast and getting Monday and Thursday delivery of fresh ingredients like 500 pounds of shrimp pictured below. Other manufactures may have even more protracted timelines for production.)
Now picture taking your pack of LRS food out of the freezer, thawing a chunk of food in water and putting it in the fridge for another 5-7 days. By that 7th day you are now feeding your aquarium inhabitants a shrimp which has been kept above freezing for a total of up to 14 days, 5-7 before processing and 7 after. The other potential pitfall with keeping food thawed for many days is the possibility for the food to warm up to room temperature. How many of us have ever taken food out and became distracted with an text message, phone call or an interruption only to walk into the kitchen an hour later to find your cup of food on the counter. (I've done it
If you look at it another way would you eat sushi with a piece of seafood or shrimp which was 14 days old?
I understand many folks will mention they have kept thawed fish food in the fridge for a week with no ill effects. I am not saying that feeding that food is a death sentence to your fish, but it certainly isn't optimal. We go through great pains and expense to produce a product which means closely monitoring production temperatures, storage times, supplements, packaging, etc. We want to ensure that our consumers are reaping the benefits of this hard work by feeding the food in a prompt fashion to maximize the nutritional value. I know from working with public aquaria, aquaculture facilities and many breeders that they have protocols in place to discard unused food after each feeding which further serves to reinforce my recommendation. Some of these facilities are feeding specimens such as the rarest angels and leafy sea dragons which can cost in excess of $20,000. If those folks don't recommend keeping food in the fridge for several days I trust them!
I hope this helps and it is a great topic of discussion. Scott L and I discussed this at length and as chance would have it the LRS is a little too chunky for the auto-feeder, so as he stated he feeds that manually which works out to be the best way.
You also have to consider that space can be an issue for some, and while compact, that small fridge takes up space.
This is only a one time solution. The idea of having a fridge and dosing the food is that this will likely feed for weeks at a time without needing to physically feed
