When Your Fridge Loses Its Mind: What to Use Before you Call a Repairman

This is the situation I would have placed my money on the fact that you have experienced at least once.

Late evening. You are hungry, stumbling into the kitchen after a hard day work and you open the fridge. Hot air touches your face. The butter has gone soft. The milk has a texture of having been placed on a picnic table. And your brain instantly begins to do that horrible mental arithmetic how much food we put in the garbage, what does a service call cost, and actually who made these things anyway?

Pull up.

As a senior technician in Wilson & Myers appliance repair company in Denver, CO I have been fooling with appliances too long to say otherwise: before you call anybody, do this stuff first.

And the most important, and, frankly, the most significant: your refrigerator is a computer.

No, really. It was long ago that the times when a refrigerator was nothing but a box with a motor are long gone. It has a microprocessor inside and as with any electronics it can crash up not the good crash up. It only takes the slightest change of power in the grid, the sort of thing you would not even notice, and the control board simply collapses. Lamps are illuminated, screen flickering, compressor doing nothing whatever.

The solution is almost painfully easy. Hard reset.

Take the plug out of the wall. Not the small power switch on the panel, but literally pull out the cord. Wait five full minutes then. Not two, not three, five. It takes that much time to discharge the capacitors on the board and actually have the entire system reset. Plug it in again, then.

Mm, it is just the same as turning your phone on again. Well, it does work occasionally. I am aware how stupid it sounds. You will wonder how frequently that will do.

Thing Two: your refrigerator does not make cold. It cools down the heat.

And it is not merely the stuffy wordplay, it is literally the mechanism of the thing. The interior heat in the cabinet is transferred to the outside by condenser coils, either on the back or underneath depending on your model. And coils, too, those? With time they are completely buried. Dust, pets, the dust that floats about your kitchen, grease particles that have been hovering around your kitchen all these, it all comes in there like insulation and holds the heat in.

It does not take much to guess what follows. The compressor is operating 24 hours, your electric bill is silently rising, and the inside is warm anyway. Your refrigerator is literally choking to death.

Go peep round the back of it. Get a vacuum, a soft brush, take fifteen minutes back there, in case there is a mat of dust and rubbish. You would not believe the number of times that would set it straight.

Thing Three, and almost nobody would ever consider it: you could be stuffing your groceries in the air.

I feel the temptation to stuff a fridge to the brim, particularly after the Costco store. However, the compartments have vents within them – that is how cold air circulates in reality. Squeeze a casserole dish right into one and you will have a problem.

The strange thing is that what follows is that whatever happens to be sitting directly in front of that blocked vent begins to freeze over, with the rest of the fridge getting warmer. Since the temperature sensor does not receive the true data any more- the cold air does not reach the sensor.

Simple tip: always keep a couple of inches between your food and the wall behind it. Every time. Action, just do it.

Thing Four: sound diagnosing is actually helpful.

Your fridge has fans that are running in it. One that is close to the compressor in the back and one or more in the compartments depending on your model. When one dies, that zone will simply cease cooling, that is, plain and simple.

The following is how to check. Open the door, locate the little door-switch button on the frame (that which cuts the light when you close it) and stick your finger on it. You are fooling the fridge that the door is closed. Wait approximately ten seconds and listen. The motor should be making a steady hum. Silence? That is no good – that fan is likely dead.

When You Really Do Need a Refrigerator Repair Pro.

Compressor still silent after the reset or it is clicking to some strange rhythmic cycle. A coat of frost or ice has got up on the interior back wall, here is a discussion of the evaporator and the defrost system. Coils are good, you have changed its settings, and it is still warm inside, maybe a refrigerant leak.

Sure, call somebody at that time. It is not only useless to get yourself inside the sealed refrigerant system, but it is actually dangerous.

Bottom line: you can save some money by spending five minutes without a power source and having a glance at what is happening behind the fridge before you write out a check to the repairman. In other times that is the entire remedy. And by the way- when have you ever looked back there before?