Months without a fridge

[ghostjmf]

So during the winter, my housemate expressed displeasure with the results of the fridge's defrost cycle; they didn't like their ice cream being anything other than rock-solid. I gave them permission to turn the control in the freezer more toward "coldest". Little did either of us know that all that control controlled was a little door blocking off cold to the fridge in order to keep more of it in the freezer, which, it turns out, is how most fridges in the $400-$800 range work these days, if they have that control at all.


Well, come summer, with things mysteriously spoiling in the fridge, & droplets of water periodically falling from the fridge ceiling, we called the landlord's designated repair place. Repair-person came, decreed that there was no ice blockage (which is what usually keeps cold air from getting into fridge from freezer, where the compressor is, & which they said was what was wrong on their bill to landlord, despite not having found much of any), said if anything else (thermostat, little motor thingie that warms up freezer to melt ice during refrost cycle) was on blink they'd be able to tell by whether various other parts were hot, etc, closed things back up, & food kept spoiling. We had, at repair-person's instructions, moved all controls back to the center positions, so that little door between freezer & fridge was open to factory specs, in order to let cold into fridge; no matter. Eventually I bought a fridge thermometer which at some points during a 100-degree heat wave registered 60 degrees F in the fridge part. meanwhile the ice cream, ice etc in freezer remained rock solid. So we know compressor is working, but but something else isn't. (Generally, the temp in fridge goes between 42 & 52 degrees. It's supposed to be 37 degrees.)


Call the repair person to come back, they come back, declare fridge "fine" again.

Call landlord to get them to buy new refrigerator for us. This one could probably be fixed if the repair person actually wanted to fix it, but when you add up repair visit costs, may as well buy new machine. Landlord used to get fridges from a place that stocked appliances with cosmetic dings on them. Last time I had to gently discuss with them in order to get them not to order fridge too wide to get into my apartment. These days, they send tenants to Home Depot, where landlord has a credit card. So I picked out a fridge that would fit though my 30" apartment door, the same size as the bad fridge, 28", but a few inches deeper. Couldn't find one shallower except a very small one.


This was "tax rebate weekend" here in Mass, the 16th, & Home Depot said the delivery people would not show up until the 28th, as they were all booked up 'til then.


I later went to Sears to see what they had; the closest to my dimensions was the same fridge I had already picked out at Home Depot. Despite Sears having a 28" Kenmore on-line, they don't have it as a "demo" in their closest store. Even later, I did internet search to find a file with 961! complaints against GE fridges, the brand I'd picked out. Left to my own devices, I would have gotten a Sears Kenmore even if I had to special-order it. But as all the complaints were against the higher-end GE fridges, I hope mine will not be one of their lemons.


More suspense is coming Wednesday, the 28th, as Home Depot already told us the delivery people come from GE, not Home Depot, & sometimes won't deliver past the 2nd floor; I'm on the 3rd. Rather than lining up better delivery people, Home Depot will in that instance give landlord their money back, & I'm back to square one. Yes, I will waive money at the "free delivery" crew if they balk.


Its harder living on just fruits & veggies, which are OK at 60 degrees F for a little while, than I would have thought. There's also that still-rock-hard ice cream, though.

[littlebeast13]

More suspense is coming Wednesday, the 28th, as Home Depot already told us the delivery people come from GE, not Home Depot, & sometimes won't deliver past the 2nd floor; I'm on the 3rd. Rather than lining up better delivery people, Home Depot will in that instance give landlord their money back, & I'm back to square one. Yes, I will waive money at the "free delivery" crew if they balk.

Good luck with that....

lb13

[jarnon]

More suspense is coming Wednesday, the 28th, as Home Depot already told us the delivery people come from GE, not Home Depot, & sometimes won't deliver past the 2nd floor; I'm on the 3rd. Rather than lining up better delivery people, Home Depot will in that instance give landlord their money back, & I'm back to square one. Yes, I will waive money at the "free delivery" crew if they balk.

Good luck with that....

lb13

Found it!

[jaybee]

Just so you know - Most refrigerator doors are designed to come off (fairly easily)*, and include directions for doing just that taped to the outside of the door. Taking the doors off cuts the depth down by 4" to 6" plus makes it lighter and easier to move around.

*You'll need a few basic tools.

[ghostjmf]

jaybee says:

Just so you know - Most refrigerator doors are designed to come off (fairly easily)*, and include directions for doing just that taped to the outside of the door. Taking the doors off cuts the depth down by 4" to 6" plus makes it lighter and easier to move around.

*You'll need a few basic tools.

jaybee, if your crew were doing the delivery, I'd have gone for broke & ordered one of those 29-1/2" models. Or even a 30"! Except of course the thing I've already ordered will dwarf the part of the kitchen it's going into, even though for a triple-decker (type of apt bldg) kitchen it's fairly large. But I do not trust the GE delivery crew to be equipped to take doors off fridges & put them back on right, any more than I trusted the crew on the last fridge delivery, who I had to tell to take the thing out of the box to get it through the door (really!). I anticipate I may have to do that again.

I can do many things, but without a runthrough 1st, & the right tools, & some help positioning the damn door, getting a door on & off a fridge myself is not one of them. Or anyway, I don't want to find out the hard way. One of the few things I believe the "won't trade out parts" repair-person on is that the fridge, & it's door, have to be level, or "things won't work right". And I'm not sure after I got done screwing around with it (literally) it would ever be level. (Also, more-expensive fridges have electronic sensors in the doors that you really don't want to mess with. This is not one of those.)


The "more to this story", if anyone is interested besides me (& even if they're not!) is that the "all the cold comes into the fridge through that tiny slot from the freezer" explanation the repair-person gave us just did not sound right to me. So I looked it up, & unless they've severely changed fridge design since everybody wrote their internet articles, its not right. I'm sure that slot "helps out", but the real reason your fridge part is less cold than your freezer part, in units that don't have separate compressors, & very few do have that, is that the # of coils of tubing with coolant running through them in the fridge region is a lower # than in the much-smaller freezer region.


We could see the many, many coils in the freezer when repair-person took the cover off of them. They never took any cover off of any part of the fridge, nor can I see where they would, either. Doesn't mean fridge coils are not in there, somewhere in the walls &/or back. They'd pretty well better be, unless all the cold really does depend on that tiny slot between freezer & fridge.

If there was a total blockage of coolant between freezer & fridge, I'd guess the fridge would be even hotter than it is, but I'm guessing there is a certain amount of blockage, so most of the circulating coolant is circulating only through the freezer. Which would make the suggestion several people complaining about GE fridges (the kind I just ordered!) got, to "turn the whole thing off for 24 hours", make a certain amount of sense. A blockage, if it's just frozen coolant & not sludge of some kind, should loosen up in that circumstance. It would of course mean losing the few foods we've got left (all that nice rock-hard ice cream & sorbet, some frozen foods, ice) unless I had a big ice-chest packed with ice ready for it. If we hadn't already ordered the new fridge, for which the landlord is paying, I might just try it. I do love science experiments. Under controlled circumstances. Didn't work for anybody GE told to do it, though.


If anyone's interested, the current & I hope only lemon I see for a while, except the yellow, needs-to-be-refrigerated kind, is a White-Westinghouse.


(I realize that with the right tools, used by people who know how to use them, & very, very delicately, you can get the moulding off your apartment door, too, without breaking it of course! which gives at best maybe another inch-&1/2 clearance. I thought about it, then thought "I am in my current frayed state not up to this".)

[Beebs52]

We bought a new expensive fridge at our old house that they removed the door etc to get in. Then when we got to our new smaller place where the prevous owner had left her counterflush fridge we thought we could switch it out. Nope. Even removing handles and door we woulda had to disassemble massive carpentry. Net net is sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and meant to be plugged in in the garage as an extra fridge. Good luck with the installation.

[ghostjmf]

My sister, when she bought the new fridge for the house our Mom left her (for taking care of Mom for the last 12 years of her life), bought a Sears Kenmore of course, & had measured it to fit in the very particular slot for it in the ranch-house kitchen, but when she got it in found that for some reason I can't remember at present it had to stand out from the wall a few more inches than the old one did, even though it had the same dimensions. So you have to squeeze by it, a little, as it's at the entrance, to get into the kitchen. No big deal.

Moral of the story is that there are great appliances out there, but people in smallish places don't always have enough places to put them (without major, major remodeling. She'd like to do major, major remodeling, but refrigerator placement was never part of this plan.).

[geoffil]

962

Add me to the GE fridge complaint list. 2 months after the warranty expired, the compression broke and it cost $500 to fix and took 10 days to get a repairman to come because they were booked fixing the other 961 people whose fridge broke. When we moved to Texas, the buyer of our house wanted the fridge and said if he didn't get it the deal to buy the house was off. We didn't give in since and he was a butt head putting no money down and using tax payer stimulus money to buy they house that he failed to keep up and let it go to crap, and said no so he had to buy a new fridge. We gave it away when we moved to Texas to a women's shelter that a co-worker volunteers at and the fridge still works great.
The fridge just took up room in a garage that is now part basement because Texas soil doesn't like basements.

[ghostjmf]

the "nice" thing about a compressor going is that it's real easy to diagnose what's wrong(!). And if mine had had a compressor go that would have taken $500.00 to fix, the solution would have been really simple, because even the replacement fridge isn't worth that much, after various rebates, brand new. I guess that's the "nice" thing about having doorway-dimension contraints; it's 28" wide or even less wide, so you're buying "bottom of the line" design-wise. Which I don't mind, because you have to get way-higher in price to get features that mean something to me; ice-maker just doesn't do it. Unless I want to go that "take the door off" route. I checked; the delivery contract I signed says "all carpentry work is to be done by the buyer". It might be hard getting delivery people on their schedule so tight they couldn't get to me for 2-1/2 weeks to wait for me to figure out how to take the door off.


They were supposed to call "after 2:00pm the day before delivery", so of course they called at 11:45am. But it was to tell me the delivery time is the 4-hour window starting at 11:45am tomorrow, & they're supposed to call a 1/2 hour before they actually arrive so I can take the food out. We'll see. I should be moving furniture around tonight to make the "path to the kitchen" as unobstructed as possible. It's a straight shot, but there's a dresser alongside the front door, & a largely-cosmetic, if you can call it that, folding door at the kitchen entrance that makes that doorway even smaller, so it has to go away for a while. The operative words here are "should be".

[geoffil]

Good luck with the delivery!

[ghostjmf]

Its in the kitchen!!!


The delivery people, when I told them how grateful I was that they were bringing it up to the 3rd floor, said "who told you we wouldn't?" so I told them "Somerville Home Depot" (if there's more than one, I gave them directions, not remembering it's exact street address, which could best be described as "so there's really room for a Home Depot up there? Yeah, a huge one". Except I'm sure they don't build one unless they have a huge site.


Unlike a couple other sets of delivery people I've met in my life, including the ones who brought the last fridge, these people were not intelligence- or efficiency-challenged in any way. (Yeah, I told them they would have to take it out of the box to get it through the upstairs doors because I'm me, but they went up ahead to measure EVERYTHING before they started up with the fridge, so they already knew that.)


Yes, I did tip them. That you're expected to tip people who are already getting paid for working on your house, delivering stuff etc is something I learned late in life from people who do that for a living. Or, as one acquaintance said, "you didn't offer the workmen beer? You have to offer them beer!". Frankly, if people are working at my house all day I will offer them soft drinks, coffee, tea, food. Not beer! These guys I handed cash, & am proud I learned that, even late. (Didn't hurt that they had the last tip they got clipped to their board by the tenant's name.)

They also asked that I say nice things about their delivery when the company they work for calls & asks me, "or else we don't get to keep working". No problem there either.

[macrae1234]

Glad to hear a happy ending story enjoy your fridge

[macrae1234]

Glad to hear a happy ending story enjoy your fridge

[macrae1234]

Glad to hear a happy ending story enjoy your fridge