TIFU by buying a fridge. tifu

I'm an apartment-bound homebrewer in China, and I'm getting into making sausages and cheese as well. I end up needing a fair amount of temperature-controlled fermentation space as well as freezer space, so I've wanted a bigger fridge to cover my needs. December 12 is a big online shopping holiday here, so I did some searching and found a nice big fridge with enough room for 2-3 beer fermenters up top and a lot of freezer space down below. My wife didn't really like the idea all that much, but she signed off on it since it would cover all my needs and I wouldn't be in her hair about fermentation or freezer space anymore.

I bought the fridge and it was delivered about a week later. When it arrived, the shippers cut it out of the box (no other way to open it in my apartment) and I set the huge box and packaging out in the hallway. I was actually delighted when that stuff all disappeared an hour later (lots of old folks gather stuff to sell to recyclers and the packaging for my fridge was probably worth more than they usually collect in a day), since I didn't have to get rid of it myself. The fridge sat and collected dust for a few weeks, unplugged so it wouldn't collect a bunch of condensation before I could get the time to buy and install the temperature controller that would manage the refrigerator portion at my fermentation temperatures while allowing the freezer to freeze everything down below.

Yesterday, I finally got the controller and opened up the fridge's built-in thermostat to get a look at the wiring. I had to break a small corner of the light fixture's cover to get this open (poor design on the tabs), but figured it was no problem because it's my fridge anyway. I took the picture and posted it to a forum to get some help with the wiring.

The responses: "That's a single-compressor fridge. You can't control the fridge and the freezer separately."

So now I've got a huge fridge with a small broken part and no packaging to effect a return, and it won't do what I bought it to do. My wife, who already gets on my case regularly for leaping before I look, is never going to let me live this down.

tl;dr - Bought a fridge for freezing and fermenting. Can do one but not both. Wife's gonna kill me.

Submitted January 06, 2016 at 02:16PM by FatDragoninthePRC http://ift.tt/1Z4SaRi tifu