Do you have first hand experience with a chest freezer thawing quickly without power?
No, just the opposite, actually. I now have a back-up generator at the house but we've never lost the contents of the freezer because of outages. Some of those lasted days. IIRC, I piled moving blankets and foam board around the freezer, at one time.
Understood on the coil locations. My five yr. old Whirlpool 10' chest has the compressor and coils on the bottom.
You've actually got me thinking about a separate small freezer. Right now, I run a small 120V residential fridge either with shore power or inverted. Getting a small freezer would be a good excuse to upgrade my solar system. :B