Thursday, April 28, 2016

Refrigerator running defrost cycle every couple of hours fixit

We have one of those stupid frost-free refrigerators. It's a Hotpoint, no idea how old it is (we rent and it came with the apartment).

I read that the defrost cycle is only supposed to run once every 6-10 hours. But this one is going into defrost mode every 2-4 hours. It doesn't really seem to have a set schedule for doing it either.

It also sucks at regulating the temperature. It's either too cold or too warm. When it's running, the freezer gets down to -10F and the refrigerator gets down to about 25F. This results in a lot of items inside the refrigerator freezing, such as vegetables, and even stuff like cheese and yogurt. Then during the defrost cycle, usually the fridge gets to around 42F and the freezer gets to around 20F, but every few days or so it does this weird thing where both the fridge AND freezer get to 30 degrees F (or sometimes the freezer can get as high as 40 during these times!)

The maintenance guy for our apartment complex removed the back panel to see if there was ice buildup on the coils, but there wasn't. Then he tried replacing the motor but that didn't change anything to affect how it runs. Then he basically told me I was making a big deal out of nothing. He claimed that it is normal for the freezer to reach 30 degrees F every once in a while and that it's only a problem if it stays there for over 2 hours.

So anyway, what could the problem be? Is this something that I have to worry about when it comes to food safety? I try not to keep anything in the refrigerator or freezer for longer than two weeks unless it's like, condiments or something like that, for this reason. Is it common for a refrigerator to run the defrost cycle this often? Do I need to get it fixed or replaced?

Thanks.



Submitted April 29, 2016 at 12:22AM by dragthewaters91 http://ift.tt/26xZL1i fixit

No comments:

Post a Comment