A lot of that shit seems most prevalent with this whole move to french door refrigerators IMO.
I still have rock solid 2nd refrigerator of the classic types (top/bottom or 2 door) that will never die. Makes a great beer fridge.
Refrigerators don't really exist. They're a myth. What everyone owns are freezers with a less freezy section that's powered by a temp controller and a fan. The freezer gets as cold as you set it...then there's a duct with a fan that blows air either up or down or to the side to direct the cold air to the non-frozen side.
All of them have a single flaw/point of failure and that's the defrost circuit. When the evaporator gets iced up too much and doesn't fully thaw between cycles for whatever reason, it starts building ice. The further the ice is away from the defrost heater (which these days is basically just like a resister coil that warms up), the more the ice builds around the evaporator and solidifies....eventually, if it does thaw, you'll have a bunch of water in the pan that may not have time to drain before it freezes and maybe plugs the drain line that goes under the fridge to a pan. On some of the top-freezer models of the old days, there was a really good heater coil that defrosted the freezer. I read a bunch of repair guys simply hung a long paperclip that was bent a certain way off the coil and extended it down the drain tube so it transferred enough heat to keep the lines open....genius fix!
The most common cause for all of this is either faulty temp sensors or when the soft rubber seals don't seat properly to allow condensation to form around stuff before freezing again. I'm not 100% certain, but I would be interested to see if most people have freezer freezing up issues more commonly in the summer months when that temp difference would cause more condensation issues. In any case, once the system is out of balance, it *could rectify itself over time, or you could thaw the whole system down and basically reboot the freezer by letting all that ice and water go....at the expense of storing food somewhere else.
Of course, the only moving parts these days aside from coolant between the evaporator and compressor is the fan I mentioned above. That could always mechanically fail, but they typically aren't more than $40-50 for replacements. Otherwise, everything else are sensors that don't really have moving parts...they just flex with temp fluctuations. The best fridges are the ones that don't have a lot of extra circuit boards, but I'm afraid we're past that. I'm just hopeful that over time, the circuitry will be common enough between models that it won't fail as often and won't be expensive to find replacements.
My parents bought a fridge 11 years ago from Lowe's...it failed almost immediately after they got it. It took repair guys 10 trips and replacing half of the parts in it before swapping the computer. They should have just had Lowe's swap the whole unit. It was pretty ridiculous dealing with that nonsense, but I understand those companies can't test every component easily when building those things.
Facebook
Twitter