Lessons In Fixing a Fridge

Life Lesson Can Be Obtained Event From The Simple Act of Fixing A Fridge.

I fixed a fridge yesterday and although that doesn’t sound like an amazing feat it feels pretty wonderful. The sweet reward of figuring out a problem and creating a remedy is one of the greatest feelings you can give yourself. Let it be known I have no prior experience fixing refrigerators. So the learning process was a reward in and of itself. This was not my fridge and the owner gave me two days to work out the problem and if it wasn’t solved he was going to buy a new fridge. Remember that point because its becomes the life lesson later on. Here was the problem. The freezer was very cold and the refrigerator portion quite warm. So I needed to troubleshoot this problem which could mean any number of things.

First I had to learn how to test all the potential failures in the system was it the compressor or condenser fan, was it the compressor coils, could it be the heating element, was it possibly the thermistors maybe even the damper. The owner had hired a technician who assumed damper so that was replaced to no avail already. Which is another great lesson often times a “professional” is just guessing and unless you check every possible scenario your just blindly throwing darts at the wall hoping to hit your intended target. Sometimes you might get lucky but most of the time you’ll miss wildly. Also don’t always take a “professional’s” opinion to be the truth.

Now I also went at the problem from a mechanical standpoint. I did visual inspections first, fans worked great coils weren’t too dirty. Then with a multimeter I began to test the heating element, no problems there. After that I moved to the thermistor, which seemed to work great. Everything I checked seemed to be in perfect working order. So then I thought to myself I need to come at the problem differently. If everything on the machine works why can’t cold air get to the refrigertor and that’s when it clicked. It has to be an air flow problem, so that’s where I turned my attention too. I thought cold air is blow up from the freezer pushed into the refrigerator. but the fridge is not allowing it to be pulled through. The system works in a flow state, cold air up from the freezer into the fridge, warm air from the fridge cycles back to the freezer below. And round and round it goes. And that’s when I found the problem. After troubleshooting for hours and coming up with blanks the problem wasn’t the fridge at all, the problem was user error. The fridge was at one point must have gotten over stuffed, creating poor airflow not enough to stop the machine from working but enough to slowly build an ice dam in the vents and as the dam grew it eventually sufficated all air flow back to the freezer. To the point the freezer would continue to over freeze while the fridge got none of the flow. All I had to do was melt the ice in the vent and it was in full working order.

This is where that beautifully poetic ironic life lesson comes into play. Too often we replace people or things because we think they need fixing or we go through the trouble of trying to fix them, to only end up still not achieving the outcome we want. But sometimes that’s not what is necessary. More often than not, they are perfect the way they are and they just need a little time to warm up and thaw out. The owner of the fridge was so close to buying and new one and had he done that. This fridge would have been unplugged and set aside. Maybe to end up in a dump or whatever but the irony of that is just sitting unplugged it would have thawed out on its own and would have been in perfect working order the next time it was plugged in. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. Which you might have never known had you not gone through the challenge of figuring it out for yourself.

Everything is fixable. It’s important to problem solve and it’s just as important to realize not all problems can be solved with the same line of thinking. You must open your mind to different forms of thought. I started out mechanical minded and ended up philosophical. However you do it enjoy the process.