So after losing two fridges in five months I finally pushed my landlord to get a real electrician out instead of the handyman who just stuck a tester in the slot and said it was fine. The new guy pulled the cover plate off and found the neutral wire in the box was barely hanging on, loose backstab connection from whenever the place was wired. Every time the compressor kicked on it was arcing and dropping voltage. He moved both conductors to the screw terminals and tightened everything down, then left a plug-in voltage tester running for a day. Steady as anything. My current fridge, which had been running warm-ish on the milk shelf for weeks, got properly cold again within a few hours. Turns out it was limping along on garbage power the whole time and I just thougt the thermostat was off. Anyway if your fridge is dying young and the electrician only checked the outlet with a little tester pen, ask them to actually open the box and look at the connections. That backstab thing apparently is super common in buildings from the early 2000s. Food's cold, ice is frozen, and I'm not buying a fourth fridge. Small wins.
Update on my fridge saga - turns out it was the outlet after all
Nov 09, 2026
Last reply: 9 hours ago
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I had the reverse expirience and it still cost me two fridges, so I believe you on the wiring thing. Ours kept failing in a rental where the kitchen outlet shared a circuit with the microwave. Every time we ran both at once the fridge would brown out and click off. First fridge was a Whirlpool, lasted 14 months. Second one, a Frigidaire, died even faster. Finally an appliance tech came out for a third oppinion and asked if we ever noticed the lights dimming when the microwave ran. We hadn't, but once he pointed it out it happened constantly.
He got the landlord to move the fridge to its own circuit and that unit has been fine for three years now with the same Frigidaire moved back in.
The part that still annoys me is nobody ever thinks to check power first. Two service calls and both techs just assumed the fridge was bad and quoted replacements. It took the third guy five minutes of questions to figure it out.
This thread is making me feel vindicated. We spent two years blaming our old house's wiring for warm fridge issues and it turned out the compressor start relay was the actual culprit. The thing that finally cracked it was a plug-in voltage and power monitor I left on the outlet for a week. It logged everything and showed the voltage never sagged once, so the power was clean and the fridge itself was the problem. Swap the relay, cold milk ever since. Sometimes it really is the fridge.
Same boat here, except our culprit was dust. Kept blaming the fridge for running warm and noisy, nearly replaced it. Then I pulled it out to paint behind it and the condenser coils were absolutely caked in dog hair. Cleaned them off, and the thing's been humming along fine for a couple years since. Now I do that every spring and it takes like ten minutes with the vacuum brush. Between bad wiring, shared circuits, and plain old grime, seems like half these dead fridge stories don't need a new fridge at all.
Update: the fix held. Been two weeks and the fridge is finally keeping things properly cold, so I grabbed one of those plug-in monitors like the person above mentioned just to keep an eye on it. Still fighting the landlord though, since now he says the wiring was never the problem and won't chip in for the dead fridges. Did anyone here actually get an landlord to pay for appliances killed by bad power?
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