I had to defrost my frostless refrigerator overnight. 

Defrosting the fridge is an operation I remember from kidhood, when most refrigerators in rental apartments didn’t usually have that auto defrost cycle feature. But it’s something these days I’ve come not to expect having to do. The little chest freezer in the basement, yes. But I don’t think they even make frostless chest freezers since the defrost cycle bounces the temperature up and down somewhat. And the small cube fridge I used to keep in my STScI office before I retired (the first time) and which now I keep in my den. The mid Atlantic states are very humid and without a self defrosting feature they will ice up fairly often.

Some time ago when the fridge that came with the house began to fail I opted to buy a smaller, simpler new one. The one I have now is scaled for a solitary grocery shopper and is simple enough mechanically that it has the old style radiator on the back of the unit, which means you can’t push it up against the wall, you have to give it some space for air flow around the radiator. They all used to be designed like that.

This makes the thing simple. All there is to it mechanically is the compressor and a thermostat to maintain temperature. The frostless designs add a small heater near the evaporator coils and a timer that periodically turns off the compressor and begins a heat cycle to melt frost off the coils before it starts to accumulate and block them off. That’s one of the things that happened to the fridge that came with the house, a too large for me GE (the previous owner of the house seems to have had a thing for GE appliances…everything in the house was GE except the InSinkErator).

Thing is, in the frostless refrigerators the cooling coils are usually hidden behind a plastic panel and a fan blows cold air from the coils into the freezer. So when the defrost cycle fails and the coils get blocked off with ice you have to disassemble the area around the back of the freezer to get to them. I have a blog post about how the fridge that came with the house failed and a photo of the coils totally, I mean totally bricked in with ice. I was stunned.

Yesterday I began to suspect something like that was happening to the fridge I have now, when I pulled a bottle of ice tea out of the fridge and it wasn’t very cold in my hand. So I checked the thermometer in freezer compartment and the temperature there was right where it should be. I hand checked some bottles in the lower compartment and they didn’t feel cold enough. So I put the thermometer down there and instantly it began to rise out of the refrigerator cool zone. Last time that happened with the previous refrigerator, it was a sign that I’d need to buy a new one at some not distant enough day. I’m still paying off my December California train and Disneyland tickets.

Dear German Who Doesn’t Read My Blog…Disney should be paying you a royalties…

So, anyway, something was wrong with the fridge, but not with the evaporator coils since the freezer compartment was okay. So I looked deeper into it.

In older refrigerators, the ones I grew up with, the evaporator coils formed the freezer shelf and cold air from them just fell into refrigerator half (and you had to be super careful defrosting them!). In the newer upright refrigerators, the evaporator coils are tucked away inside a panel (it is actually laying flat between the freezer upper and lower refrigerator compartments) and a fan blows air across them into the freezer compartment and another fan blows into the refrigerator compartment below it. Thermostats connected to knobs control the fans, and how much air goes into which half of the fridge, and also the compressor cycle. Since the freezer was maintaining temperature and the lower compartment was not, I figured it had something to do either with a fan not working or something, probably ice, blocking air flow into the lower refrigerator compartment.

I dug into the freezer compartment. And here’s the thing: I had it stuffed full of recently bought food most of which, in retrospect, I should have just put into the chest freezer when I got it home. I have a sort I do when I get back from the grocery store: stuff to be kept cold but not frozen goes into the refrigerator, frozen stuff that needs kept frozen long term goes into the chest freezer (that’s usually bulk stuff I get at Costco, but also items I buy for long term storage), and frozen stuff that goes into the fridge’s freezer compartment because I am likely to use it soon.

I had the refrigerator’s freezer compartment nearly full for some reason I can’t recall now, but most of it was stuff I’d bought at Trader Joe’s just to try out and see if I liked. I don’t usually keep the refrigerator freezer that full. When I started looking into it I saw that all that frozen food was blocking air vents I hadn’t really noticed before, and they were frozen over with ice.

Okay, thinks I, here’s the problem. I tried chipping away at the ice but that’s risky business if you don’t know exactly where the evaporator coils and refrigerant lines are, and in the newer units all of that is tactfully hidden away from the owner in favor of how it looks to the eye of the buyer.

So I took everything out of the freezer and put it in the chest freezer downstairs. Having a plan B when the fridge is giving you trouble is one reason to keep even just a small chest freezer in the house. Then I took all my freezer packs I keep frozen for travel and emergencies, put those into my travel coolers and put the “keep refrigerated” and the “keep refrigerated after opening” food into them and what was left of the ice from the ice maker on top and closed them up.

Then I unplugged the refrigerator (I’ve never seen one with an actual on/off switch) and opened the freezer compartment door, figuring I’d just let any ice in the way of air flow warm up and melt off.

That was yesterday afternoon. I kept tabs on progress until I went to bed, and at my usual early morning insomnia hour and checked again, decided it looked completely clear of ice, turned it back on and went back to bed.

This morning everything seems back to normal. Both halves of the fridge are maintaining temperature. But I need to get another fridge thermometer. I had two, one for each compartment, but when I bought the chest freezer I moved one of them into that, which left the fridge with only one that I kept in the freezer, figuring if anything went wrong I’d see it there first. But…no. So I need another one for the refrigerator compartment.

The ice in my coolers is still solid so I figure the food in there is still good. I will restock the freezer compartment, but not so much it blocks those air vents.

Adventures in home ownership…