I have owned 5 different refrigerators, and the latest is a top of the line 6 year old Maytag. All of them have to be adjusted up and down with the outside temperature. On hot days, its not cold enough, and on cold days, it freezes lettuce. All the refrigerators I have seen do this. Isn't there a fridge that will keep an accurate temperature using modern electronics ?
Mine have all been rather accurate.
How are you measuring the temperature? Are the door seals in good condition and the doors properly adjusted?
How hot is hot? Never had the problem. We do have a refrigerator at work that cannot keep up when the ambient temperature reaches 110 degrees. Mine at home are OK into the 90's with no adjustments.
Could it be you are turning the fridge to a cooler setting when it is in a very hot climate and already running 100% of the time? If so, no matter how far you adjust the knob, the compressor can do no more than it already is doing. When it turns cooler, it will freeze things because you have it set too cold. When the heat breaks, the cooling system can finally work properly, but now you have set it too cold.
Again, how hot is hot? My guess is the problem would partly go away if you just left it in the right setting.
There are some refrigerators that use modern electronics instead of hundred year old mechanical thermostats. I have a GE Profile Arctica unit with proper digital controls. I believe all the LG stuff used them as well along with many of the other asian brands.
Pete C.
Hi, Digital or analog I never experienced that kind of problem.
I don't really think I can add to the first three answers, but I'm posting anyhow. :)
The nine refrigerators I've own or used for a year or more since I was born 59 years ago all seemed to work ok. None have had any electronics. I adjust the temp, and if it has a freezer to fridge ratio control, that a bit, until the ice cream just colder than soft, and the milk is definitely cold, and then I'm done until I move somewhere else.
Except when I was in college, in 1969, in an apartment, that one started freezing the lettuce and would do so even at the warmest setting. Maybe we shoudl have told the landlord,
Boring story that won't help the OP: but my roommate found an abandoned, we thought (still think so), fridge in the basement, and we dragged it up one flight of stairs to our back door. Wide wood Chicago steps. Boy, was it hard to get it up the stairs with 2 or 3 of us. Then we used that fridge for our second and last year, and we put the broken one in the pantry, and together the 3 of us and the girl who came over to share meals with us 5 nights a week, we bought a quarter cow.*** Of course fridges don't have enough insulation to be used economically as a freezer, but we didn't realize that for months. The meat lasted 3 or 5 months or something, so we wasted a bunch of money and electricity, but the meat never spoiled.
***That's a cow that can run very fast over a quarter mile.| I have owned 5 different refrigerators, and the latest is | a top of the line 6 year old Maytag. All of them have to be | adjusted up and down with the outside temperature. On hot days, | its not cold enough, and on cold days, it freezes lettuce. | All the refrigerators I have seen do this. Isn't there a | fridge that will keep an accurate temperature using modern | electronics ?
The only solution I found to this problem was to get an expensive SubZero unit which has a separate cooling system for the freezer and refrigerator sections. If you have the space then a cheaper solution might be to get separate freezer and refrigerator units. As far as I know, the problem has nothing to do with (lack of) modern electronics. It seems to be caused by a combination of cost-reduced construction and poor thermostat sensor placement.
Before the SubZero I had an expensive (yet still cheap compared to the SubZero :) KitchenAid that had the problem you describe. I even had to tweak it depending on how full it was and on whether I was going to leave it unopened for a few days. Before the KitchenAid I had a 1959-vintage Tappan which (until it failed) regulated the temperature just fine with old mechanical/analog technology. It appeared to have evaporator coils in both the refrigerator and freezer sections, but there was only a single compressor.
Had I realized what I was getting into with the KitchenAid I would have spent more effort getting the Tappan fixed. Unfortunately I bought the higher efficiency/lower cost argument for the spiffy new KitchenAid model and thus suffered with it for seven years until it failed completely. I've had the SubZero now for about seven years and so far so good...
Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com
The question was phrased badly. I should have said "why can't the refrigerator have a temperature setting, in degrees, and why can't it keep it to within a few degrees of that?".
The wall thermostat is capable of doing that. Refrigerators are not (apparently).
They could, but that would be more expensive and require some fans etc. Different parts of your frig will be a few degrees different normally. You can use this to your advantage and allow the butter to stay a a little softer. If the setting showed degrees, think of all the problems they would have when people put a thermometer in a different part and it was a few degrees different.
Take a good thermometer and move it around your home. You will find that there are cooler and warmer places. My second floor is usually several degrees warmer than the down stare and five or more degrees difference in different rooms different parts of the day is not unusual.
They can and do. A visit to an appliance store should show you a number of models with real digital temperature controls and the extra sensors, dampers and circulator fans.
I've got a 6 or so year old GE Profile Arctica unit that does exactly that and it was not a super expensive model either (though not bottom end either).
Pete C.
You are probably running the temperature at what is considerd to be too low. But I do the same thing with a similar Maytag. I keep the box temperature as cold as possible because the food condition is much better even after a long time. When the ambient swings and changes the heat gain the box temperature can easily drop to freezing if you run it this way.
Manufacturers suggest box temperatures close to 40F. So if the box temp changed a few degrees it still wouldn't be freezing.
My SubZero is the same temperature all year long.
Bscott moore wrote:
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