Showing posts with label no cool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no cool. Show all posts

Refrigerator Not Cooling - What to Check

Today we are going to talk a little about Troubleshooting a Refrigerator that is not getting cold and a few things to check to get you going in the right direction in repairing the problem.

There are a couple things that need to happen for your refrigerator to get cold.  The compressor has to run, the evaporator fan has to move the air around the refrigerator to cool down the entire inside of your fridge and freezer.  There are a couple components on your refrigerator that are going to control when the compressor and the fan run.  One being the defrost timer, the other being the thermostat or also called the cold control.  I have made a couple videos explaining how to test each one of these parts and what they look like to help guide you along in your repair.  I am still going to try to explain a basic walk through of what I would do if I was at your house.

The first thing I would check to make sure the Refrigerator was getting the proper voltage.  If you open up the refrigerator and the light is on, we can move on.  If you don't have a light inside the refrigerator, test the outlet that the fridge is plugged into and make sure that there is voltage at the plug in the neighborhood of 120VAC.  Now that we have gone over that lets move on.


On a no cool refrigerator after I have determined that power is not an issue, the next thing I would do is open up the freezer door.  There are a couple things that we are going to look for.  First thing you are going to want to listen for is the fan inside the freezer.  If the fan is running, good, if not, we have to figure out why the fan is not running.  The two parts we talked about earlier are in control of the freezer fan.  


If your fan is not running, check the compressor.  It is the black round motor in the back of the refrigerator that pumps the freon through the sealed system.  Is the compressor running?  If the compressor is running and the fan is not running we need to check the evaporator fan first.  If the compressor is not running we need to check the defrost timer and the thermostat first.

First thing I'm going to go over is checking the evaporator fan.  Most fans inside your freezer are 120 VAC fans.  When the compressor is running the fan will also be receiving voltage at the same time.  You are going to need to access the evaporator fan for this test.  At this point you are going to want to unplug the refrigerator from the wall and remove the back panel of your freezer.  You are going to need to access the evaporator fan motor.  The first test is going to be seeing if the fan is good or bad.  With the refrigerator unplugged from the wall, remove the wires that are plugged into the fan and test the resistance across the two  terminals on the fan motor.  You should not read and open circuit. Normally you should read something like 100 to 125 ohms or so.  If you test the fan and have an open circuit, the fan is bad and will need replaced.  For the next test with the fan we are going to see if the fan motor is getting the correct voltage when the compressor is running.  From here you are going to place your meter on VAC so we can test the current going to to fan.  So plug the fridge back in and test the wires going to the fan motor.  Make sure you can hear the compressor running when you do this test.  If you hear the compressor running and the fan is not getting 120 volts, the defrost timer is bad.  If your refrigerator does not have a defrost timer but has an ADC board, then its bad.  The ADC board and the Defrost timer do basically the same thing.  One is mechanical the other works off a control board.

Moving on, now we are going to run some tests for a refrigerator that the compressor and the evaporator fan are not running.  You are going to want to first locate the defrost timer on your machine.  The first check is going to be to see if it's stuck in defrost.  The fridge will go into defrost about 3 times a day.  So for around 30 minutes the compressor and the fan are shut down and the heater is turned on in the freezer to clear the frost and ice off the coils behind the rear panel.  The refrigerator does this to make sure that the cold freezer air can easily circulate throughout the whole unit, keeping everything cold.  Now for the test, grab yourself a flat head screwdriver and find the dial on the defrost timer.  You want to turn the dial clockwise.  You will hear some clicking as the timer moves.  There are two distinct clicks, first one being the timer entering defrost mode and the second distinct click coming out of the defrost cycle.  If the compressor and fan come on when you turn the dial, great, now you know that you have a bad defrost timer.  Now if that didn't make the fan and compressor come on then we have to test the thermostat.  The thermostat will also shut down the fridge when it reaches the correct temperature.   However if its defective, then it will shut down the goodies when it's not supposed to.  How to test the thermostat is pretty simple.  Unplug the fridge from the wall, remove the two wires that plug into the thermostat.  With the thermostat set to the factory setting, the midway point or so,  test the resistance across the two terminals.  If the thermostat is bad, it will read an open circuit.  If the thermostat is reading a closed circuit, then the timer is bad and not letting any voltage reach either the fan or the compressor.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and watch some videos.  I hope that the information in here has helped you locate the problem with your refrigerator and you are able to fix it.  If you have any questions or need some more help, I try to answer all my comments on my posts, either with a new post or in the comments themselves, so leave a comment with any questions you have or let me know if this helped you out.  Make sure you thumbs up the videos and add them to your favorites, that helps me out alot.

Good Luck with your repair, I hope I was able to save you some money by you not having to call out a professional.


Frigidaire Refrigerator not Cooling

Todays blog post is going to be on a service call that I performed today.  It was on a Frigidaire Side by Side refrigerator.  The problem the customer was having was that most of the food in the freezer had thawed and nothing in the refrigerator side was cool.

They had been away for a couple days and they had family coming over and checking on the pets at the house.  Their dad had notice that there was water on the floor in front of the fridge during one of the visits.  So the father opened up the freezer door and notice all the ice had melted from the ice bin, but the food in the bottom of the freezer was still frozen.  When he opened up the refrigerator door the temperature display was reading 65 degrees for both freezer and refrigerator side.  The water dispenser was also not working.

OK, so now that we know what was going on with the machine we can move on to diagnostics.  Because I have been repairing appliances for so long I already knew what was wrong with the machine, or at least what wasn't working.  So what I'm going to do is try my best to explain the basic operation of the fridge and how I determined where to start digging into the machine.

On most side by side refrigerators the evaporator coils are located in the freezer behind the rear panel toward the bottom half of the back wall.  The evaporator fan sits above that.  That fan blows the cold air from the evaporator coils to the top of the freezer compartment behind the back wall.  From there the air is divided.  Most of the air blows into the top of the freezer and creates a circular pattern of air movement.  Some of the air is pushed into the refrigerator compartment through what is called the damper.  Its basically a little door that opens and closes controlling the air flow into the fridge side of your machine.  That air starts at the top, moves down over the shelves and returns to the freezer through another damper at the bottom of the compartment.  OK, moving on.

I'm going to spoil the suspense and tell you that the fan was not working on this refrigerator.  I didn't say the fan was bad, I said not working.  There is a difference.  If the fan was bad, it would have been getting the proper voltage and not moving.  If the fan is not getting the correct voltage to operate then something else is bad and the fan is not working.  Anyway, moving on....the frost build up from the defrost issue was what was causing the fan to not be able to rotate.

What was happening with their fridge was the all the cold air being produce by the evaporator coils was not being moved around in that circular of air motion that I was talking about earlier.  The coldest air will always settle at the bottom of the fridge and of course the warmer air is going to stay at the top.  Now that we know this it makes sense that if the fan was not moving air to the top of the freezer, the ice will melt.  It will run out of the bucket, through the shoot on the door and right onto the floor.  Because the compressor is still running and producing cold air in the freezer, things at the very bottom of the freezer remained frozen.

Lets talk about why the temperature was reading almost room temperature.  The thermistors that read the temperature are located on the back wall in both compartments about 3/4 of the way up.  Now we know that warmer air is higher up, I shouldn't really have to explain any further.  Do I?  YES, thats why its frozen at the bottom and still reading a high temperature!

Why did the water stop working on the dispenser?  Well, this one is easy enough now that we know the frozen air rests at the bottom.  There is a water tank the rests behind crisper drawers of the refrigerator compartment.  That is why the water is always nice and cool when it comes out of the dispenser, when its working of course.  But that's in the refrigerator side?  Yes, because air from the freezer is going into the fridge compartment through the lower damper (that's always open), so everything at the bottom of the fresh food side of the refrigerator is also frozen when the fan stops moving the air.  That includes the water in the tank.  So when its frozen, it doesn't flow.

Here is a post with a Frigidaire Refrigerator being used a test machine to help you troubleshoot a little better.

Refrigerator Not Getting Cold

Here is a Website for Troubleshooting Frigidaire Refrigerators - Step by Step


Do you have any questions?  If so just leave them in the comment section below.  I will do my best to follow up and pass on some knowledge.