Bosch Freezer suddenly poor freezing only -3C

[Tony]

Last week I inadvertedly left ajar the door to my Bosch KTR 1565 upright frost free 4 year old freezer, housed in the garage. When I next went into the garage, 12 days later, the audible alarm was sounding and the display showed a temperature of 16C.. Needless to say all the contents were defrosted..

Anyhows I closed the door and expected the freezer to reduce the temperature back down to the preset -18C.. Well the temperature has never got lower than -3C.

Is there an explaination for this behavour , is it bust or am I over-looking the obvious. Can anything be done or is it time to buy another..

Any help gratefully received..

.. . Tony

[Sparks]

Have you tried turning it off for a while?

[Aidan]

Strangely, my Bosch frost-free freezer has recently suffered almost exactly the same problems, after one of the kids raided the lollies and dropped something behind a drawer, stopp[ing the door closing fully. I researched the subsequent poor performance on ukwhitegoods.co.uk.

The evaporator has frosted up, due to the condensation from the air that got in whilst the door wasn't shut. The freezer usually works by a fan blowing air over the evaporator, but the block of ice is obstructing the flow of air. The only fix is a complete defrost, which the Ukwhitegoods site recommends you do by unplugging, leaving the door open for 48 hours and mopping up the deluge. I think I'll have to take a fan convector to mine.

[Aidan]

See 2nd item in FAQs here;

[Tony]

Thanks aiden, I'll give it a go... Cheers..

.. Tony

[Andrew Gabriel]

My grandfather always used to defrost his fridge by standing a bar heater in front of it. When Hotpoint first brought out their Iced Diamond range, he did exactly the same with that. However, this was the first one he'd had with a plastic liner, and even Salvador Dali would have been impressed with the resulting plastic stalactites. The Hotpoint engineer couldn't believe it. "We've never had one go this this before", he said. They supplied a replacement fridge. Nowadays, the broken one would be dumped in the old Bankside Power Station...

So, be careful pumping heat into a freezer. Just a fan with no heater will work fine in this weather.

[Aidan]

I did mine yesterday, it's now operating properly. It gets to -20 easily, whereas before it struggled to get to -14.

It took about 3 or 4 hours with the fan convector, mostly with no heater but I put the lowest heat setting on occasionally & made sure the plastic bits didn't get too hot. I got about a 5 or 6 pints of water out. The water drains into the tray over the compressor, so I kept on siphoning it out with 1/4" bore tube. It probably needs defrosting annually, which I hadn't anticipated with a frost-free freezer.