Fiddling with the fridge

So the fridge was acting up, and we thought we'd have a look at it.


Surprisingly, it was pretty low tech inside. I was expecting to find a circuit board with a microprocessor.

Nope! Just a thermostat switch, a defrost timer and wire harnesses hooking them up.

The design is rather simple: The coils in the freezer have a fan that blows air around and a vent connects the refrigerator part, dropping cold air into the fridge.

The defrost timer is pretty basic, just a 12 hour timer. It's not unlike the timers that plug into a light socket that will turn your lights on and off in a set pattern.


The company was kind enough to include a paper schematic tucked inside the module in the top of the fridge that has the thermostat and the defrost timer. I guess that is the "service manual."






Taking the cover panel off in the freezer revealed the coil/radiator all iced up.

The control that determines the coldness of the freezer is just like a pivoting fireplace damper.

Less cold = more airflow to the fridge, coldest = more airflow to the freezer.


Someone (who will go nameless and blameless) stacked up some stuff that blocked the air vents that come down from the freezer. Maybe that caused it to ice up the coils in the freezer. The thermostat switch lives down in the refrigerator part, so if it isn't getting cold air it just runs and runs and the ice builds up. Once the ice builds up, air doesn't flow freely over the radiator, the thermostat doesn't shut off, and it keeps going in a positive feedback loop.

Since the fridge wasn't getting cold, turning the damper control in the freezer to "Coldest" or the thermostat in the fridge to "Colder" just made it worse, since the ice just kept building.


I'm not sure that we actually fixed anything, but after defrosting and reassembling it's working fine now. Fingers crossed.