why does my freezer work, but not my refrigerator? AskEngineers

so I have a little dorm fridge, an Igloo Fr832b. it has your standard refrigerant/compressor setup (not one of those little thermoelectric ones). there aren't any fans or anything to move air - the entire outside gets warm, and the inside walls of the freezer and fridge get cold and convection does the rest. there's a single compressor for both the freezer and refrigerator.

so up until about a week ago, it was working fine. then all of a sudden, the freezer was still just as chilly as it's always been (as far as I know - maybe it's a little warmer now and I didn't notice, but everything is still frozen solid), but the refrigerator section is almost room temperature. the only thing I did differently in that time was freeze blocks of ice to use in a cooler for a party, so I had the door open and shut a lot in that time period, but that was several days ago and I'm still getting nothing from the refrigerator.

I haven't had the chance to actually check the temperature of the back wall in the refrigerator, but to the touch it doesn't feel particularly cold. my friend has an infrared thermometer, and I've asked about borrowing it - I'll update when he gets back to me.

the seals on the refrigerator door were messed up in one area, but I fixed it (I don't think it would've been messed up enough to do anything, it just slid around a bit) and it didn't fix the problem. I'll poke around back by the compressor a bit more and mention if anything stands out (I've got a superficial understanding of refrigerators from my thermo class, so I'll try to see if anything seems weird to me).

other things worth noting - the outside of the refrigerator doesn't seem to be as warm as it used to be, and there's an odd gurgling noise in the coils just behind the freezer area that wasn't there before. I do have a lot of stuff around and on the refrigerator, but I left enough space for the heat to dissipate, and it worked fine last semester with the same setup. also, I tried defrosting the freezer to no avail.

repair history - I replaced the thermostat unit once, because the refrigerator stopped working completely. this is a different scenario, because just the refrigerator crapped out.

any ideas? I don't have the cash to buy a new one (especially since the IRS it taking its sweet time getting me my refund), so I'd like to repair this one if possible.

Submitted February 08, 2015 at 12:58AM by benevolentpotato http://ift.tt/1CFmlrR AskEngineers