Some of you may be old enough to remember how defrosting the refrigerator was a regular chore.  If you have one of those small office cube refrigerators you might still be doing it.  But near as I can tell these days they’re all the so-called "frost-free" style.  Actually, frost still accumulates, it just gets melted off the freezer coils periodically so it never builds up. 

Casa del Garrett came with a nice frost-free GE fridge.  It’s actually bigger then I need, but I won’t bother getting a smaller one until this one dies.  And it has an ice maker, which I’ve found handy.  But I’ve never lived with a frost-free fridge before, so not having to defrost every now and then has been a new experience.  These frost-free models hide the freezer coils behind a panel at the back of the freezer compartment, and just blow cold air into it via a fan.  So if frost starts building up back there you won’t know it right away.  Let me tell you how I know this.

Earlier in the week I noticed my ice maker had stopped filling the tray below it with ice.  So I pulled it out to examine it, and found a nice web site that explained step-by step how to diagnose a problem with it.  Many of the test required a multi-meter to check resistance across various switches and the motor…and being a geek of course I had one handy.  So I went through all the tests and came up empty.  Everything was working.  The problem was it wasn’t working.

I didn’t want to replace a perfectly good ice maker, but I didn’t want to call out a repairman just for that either.  I figured for the price of a service visit I could just buy a new one.  And ice makers are in the category of things I consider luxury items anyway.  As long as the fridge worked it wasn’t an emergency matter.  So I left the ice machine out and got some ice trays and began making ice the old fashioned way until I could figure out what was up with the ice maker.  In the meantime I noticed frost was starting to form at the back of the freezer compartment.

I checked to see if there was a defrost switch somewhere and of course there wasn’t because frost isn’t supposed to form on one of these kinds of refrigerators.  So I let it slide, thinking it was just a little spurious frost that had accumulated because I’d had the door open so much while debugging the ice maker.  This morning when I checked it, the little patch of frost had grown to cover almost the entire back of the freezer. 

Uhm…that wasn’t supposed to happen…  So I go dig out the owners manual.  The prior owner of the house was cool enough to save every bit of documentation on all the major appliances in the house and gave all that to me on settlement day in a big plastic pouch.  The manual for the fridge didn’t even have a section on frost in the troubleshooting guide.

Okay, thinks I, never having owned a frost-free fridge in my life…obviously frost build up inside the freezer is something so beyond normal that the manual doesn’t even cover it.  And this is happening at the same time the ice maker quit on me.  Maybe there’s a connection and I need to call a repairman.  I’m thinking at this point that maybe frost had gotten inside the water inlet line to the ice maker or a control somewhere.  But before I called for service, I began checking prices of new refrigerators. 

The one here at Casa del Garrett was at least 20 years old, judging from the service records the prior owner left with the owner’s manual.  And there were at least a half-dozen service calls made on that fridge by the prior owner.  I hadn’t really looked over all the things he’d left me in detail, just this and that as needed.  This was the first time I’d looked at the packet for the fridge.  Seeing all those service tickets concerned me.  But I’ve owned the house since June of 2001 and haven’t had any trouble with the fridge.  On the other hand, it was at least 20 years old, if not older, and it had needed a lot of work in the past.  Mostly for minor things though.  The thermostats seemed to be the biggest trouble makers.

I could get a good, state of the art energy saver fridge, sized just right for a single guy, for around 850 to a thousand bucks.  Or I could get a decent low tech smaller one for about 300-400.  I figured if I was going to replace the fridge I might as well buy a good one, but money for one of the good ones wasn’t in the budget.  But do I want to call a repairman and spend almost what a new low tech fridge would cost anyway?

I gave it some thought.  I figured since it couldn’t be the compressor it wouldn’t be hugely expensive.  And the thought of just tossing a fridge in the landfill when it could be repaired and kept in service bothered me.  So I called for a GE service tech and luckily one was available to come this afternoon.  When he arrived I told him about the ice maker, and the frost.  When he saw the frost on the back of the freezer compartment I could tell from his expression that it was a bigger problem then I’d taken it for.

Boy was it.  He had me empty the freezer and then he removed the ice maker and the back panel.  Here’s what it looked like…

Holy Crap…!!!  Look at that…the freezer coils are almost solidly bricked in.  I had no idea the frost problem was that bad.  I couldn’t see it.  It was all happening out of sight.  The tech said frost was all under the freezer floor panel too, and he asked me if I’d noticed the fridge wasn’t keeping things cold anymore.  But I don’t keep things in there for very long so I hadn’t really noticed.  Then he told me that the frost build up would keep the ice maker from working, because it depends on its own thermostat switch and won’t turn on unless the freezer is at 16 degrees or colder.  So that explained why the ice maker could pass all the tests I’d given it and still not be making any ice.  It was behaving the way it was supposed to.  The freezer just wasn’t getting cold enough.

The tech removed the ice with a stream of warm water from a small pump bucket he’d brought along.  Then he tested this and that and determined the problem was the defroster thermostat. The way it works is this: a timer periodically turns on a heating coil by the freezer coils to melt off any accumulated frost.  A thermostat shuts the heat coil off when it detects the temperature near the freezer coils is above freezing.  Wash-rinse-repeat.  This keeps the frost off the freezer coils.  Apparently the thermostat on this model fridge fails in such a way that it keeps the heat coil turned off all the time.  So then frost…happens.  And here’s the thing…you can’t see it happening because all that stuff is hidden from view in a frost-free fridge.

The tech replaced the thermostat and tested everything again, and before he left he told me it would take about four hours for the temperatures to stabilize to the dial settings.  So now my fridge is busy getting cold again and I reckon I have to toss out most of what was in the freezer since it’ll have been out long enough to thaw, even in the ice chest I stashed it all in.  The total bill for the service was just under $200.  Not so bad considering, and he was thorough. 

I have a fridge thermometer and I monitor that occasionally.  I’m buying a freezer thermometer tonight so hopefully I can see this failure mode happening sooner rather then later in the future.  I suppose the new fridges have some sort of self diagnostics built-in now.  If they don’t they should.  Some little indicator panel that displays an error code that tells you somethings wrong and what it is.  They should have temperature displays too so you can see that things are nominal.  A good geek fridge should have all of that.