I borked the fridge by defrosting with a sharp object. How can I make my mini-fridge cold enough to freeze food? DIY

I am apparently a fairly common idiot. Yesterday, I became obsessed with seeing the back wall of my freezer. This real estate was ceded to a growing ice menace literally years ago. The freezer was filled with so much ice that I decided against using the perfectly safe pot-of-boiling-water defrost method for fear of drowning afterwards. Instead, I used a hammer and a butter knife. This decision has complicated my life.

Of course I punched a hole in the freezer wall and of course a hissing chemical smell came out. 15 minutes of Googling convinced me there was no one really smart guy out there with a fix, and I accepted the fridge is a loss. I'm in an apartment, and it's their fridge, so that will need dealing with at some point. I'm an unemployed, job-hunting CS grad without the flexibility to deal with a potentially large and unknown expense right now. My freezer is stocked with chicken breasts, steaks, salmon, pork chops, and ice cream. It was just about the last thing I needed to break.

I picked up an Insignia mini-fridge on sale at Best Buy for $80 as a stopgap. It's holding the open bag of chicken breasts, salmon, and steaks in the chiller compartment, and the salmon is already getting a little soft. I moved over a still-frozen gel ice pack from my heroic, unplugged freezer this morning because hey it might help. There's still a good bit of ice in there, along with a second bag of chicken breasts, salmon, and box of hamburgers that were all still frozen solid on last check. That should buy me a few days as long as it stays closed.

So I need to tweak this Insignia mini-fridge to make the chiller compartment freeze food. If the whole thing becomes a freezer, that's fine with me. Given that I was dumb enough to defrost a freezer with a sharp object, I am clearly not an HVAC tech. The two reasonably simple mini-fridge hacks I've read involved installing a CPU fan and manipulating the temperature sensor to keep the compressor running. The second one sounds more likely to help, but I have no idea how to locate the sensor.

What's the best way to address this problem given the limited resources? I can be slow and careful, honest.

Submitted September 04, 2016 at 10:51PM by DefrostWithDynamite http://ift.tt/2c4bzUm DIY