You have been warned. If profanity upsets you stop reading now.
On Tuesday evening my husband said a dreadful thing to me,"Does the fridge seem like it isn't cold to you?" I got up and went to see for myself. Sure enough, the fridge isn't cold. Now it WAS really, really hot out, so we thought maybe the heat exchanger thingies were covered in cat hair and therefore not working efficiently enough to deal with the heat. We unscrewed and vacuumed up kitty hair from the front, back, under etc. We were really hoping at this point that it was just the cat hair, because next week I have to have a root canal (oh joy!) and since I am self-employed, it's gonna cost about $1000. Buying a new fridge would stretch the budget pretty fucking tight. Like drum tight.
Then we put an indoor/outdoor thermometer in the fridge and checked it the next morning. Nope, still warm. Approximately 70 fucking degrees Fahrenheit. Right. It was room-fucking-temperature INSIDE my fridge! We put the thermometer in the freezer to see what the temp was there. Barely 32 fucking degrees! Fucking wonderful. I had to go to work, so the hubby started calling around to find a repairguy to come. Apparently the store that we bought the fridge from 12-13 years ago only services appliances under their "wonder guard" warranty program or some such idiotic name. Which they started 5 fucking years ago. Thanks for nothing. So then the hubby started calling repair specialty guys. Apparently everyone in my fucking town has crappy appliances because no repair guy could come out for 10 days! Lucky for me, I still have my crappy little cube fridge from university days that we were storing beer in. We brought that upstairs, I washed it and we moved the stuff that we could save into that.
We thought, maybe we could just buy a new fridge. Nope, delivery on that is at least a week. At this point I was really fucking pissed. I'd just lost about $300 worth of food, not to mention all the time I had put into preparing the freezer meals that we had to throw out. So I went on the internet and started trying to figure out if I could fix the damn thing myself.
Found some basic instructions, decided to try. What the hell have I got to lose at this point?
The evapourator coils (which are the thingies that make the fridge cool) are always in the freezer compartment of your fridge. I opened the freezer and saw this:
Frost, in my frost-free fridge. Which means that the problem is with the defrosting system.
I took the back panel off my freezer on my side by side fridge.
Yup, a solid sheet of ice! I figured maybe I could get the fridge working for now, so I pulled out my hairdryer and melted the fucking ice. This is what it is supposed to look like:
So I screwed the panel back on with a couple of the screws and while the fridge cooled, I went hunting on the internets again to figure out what part of the defrost system was the problem. I found a really good step by step here.
It says I have to wait for the fridge to cool before doing the first test, so I went hunting for where to buy repair parts. Ummm, apparently, the company that made my fridge has stopped making large appliances and only makes toasters and the like now. Fucking wonderful. So any repair part I need will either be hard to find or really expensive or both. At this point I gave up and started checking out the flyers to see who had a fucking sale on appliances.
I just got back from the store where I bought myself a new fucking fridge. $1000. Fuck.
