Can my refrigerator be cooling, but just not enough? Featured

Sigh. No idea what that means.

Ok, -12°C and 15°C

-9

Something that can happen in summer is that the fridge can't cope with the load. Try opening the door to a minimum, and for the minimum time.

If the machine is that old, it could have lost some of the refrigerant gas. A profesional can refill it. But over your way, calling a profesional is prohibitive.

Less drastic, there could be dust and hair in the external coils that you could clean.

The ozone depletion potential and carbon footprint must be huge on that old fridge.

A devout liberal Democrat would have the refrigerant recovered and the unit destroyed immediately.

How dare you!

-Greta Thongturd

You'd be surprised how energy inefficient a 46 year old fridge is compared to today's models. The door gaskets are probably dried out and leak air (cold air out, warm/humid air in), the gaskets on the compressor also may be leaking coolant (good luck finding whichever Freon would be required to recharge the system), and the insulation between the outside frame and the interior is almost certainly less insulating than contemporary models.

About 12 years ago, we replaced a 30 year old fridge with what was then a new model. Both models had same features, same capacity, same style (freezer on top, single door). Afterwards, our electric bill averaged about $30/month cheaper for the entire year than the year before. That's $360/year saved. When we sold our house the fridge conveyed with the property. About a year after our move, we decided to upgrade the fridge that came with our new house. Again, even though the new fridge was about 6 cubic feet larger than the replacement, our electric bill dropped considerably when compared month by month to our bill during our first year here using the older fridge.

Yes, fridges are not cheap, especially after the new tariffs on steel, etc. But, how many more fridges do you expect to need to buy? If you live 3 more years, the saved cost of electricity running the new fridge will probably come close to amortizing the purchase price compared to your current fridge. And, that's not considering the likelihood of increasing utility rates and/or the price of the spoiled perishable food you may need to toss if your current fridge can't reliably maintain a safe temp or dies entirely while full. And, if you need to buy parts you can install yourself or if you need a service call, that's more money you probably won't need to spend soon on a replacement fridge. Buying a new fridge 18-24 months from now also will probably cost more due to inflation.

Could be low or refrigerant .

Time for a new efficient one. May not br possible to get parts for an old one. Measure hos much room you have and decide how fancy you want to get with ice makers and water dispensers.

Check for plugged drain hose from the freezing section, or flaky defrost parts like a heater or temp sensor. If you find a long term defrost fixes it short term, it could be something like that.

Replying to all. Thank you. It's a "Frost-free" model" it turned out tha that when I defrosted it, for the first time in 42 years, the 3 softballs worth of ice, there was still frost behind the raar freezer panel. So much that the fan back there (there's a fan back there) could not spin. it was about as big as a carton of cigarettes. I defrosted about a week earlier for 22 hours and all the ice I could see melted or broke off. The part I coudln't see must have been a lot bigger, and if I'd waited another 8 hours, I think it would have melted too. With the panel off it probably went faster, took 5 hours.

Now the fan spins fine and the freezer is 0^ F. (No one knows what it is in Kelvin but it's well below freezing.) But the fridge is still 44. A lot colder than before, but it shoudl be less than 40. What could cause this???? ???? I'm thinking maybe there is still ice in the vent channel between the freezer coils and the fridge compartment, that should melt or sublimate as even cold air goes over it. I only bought a quart of milk instead of half-gallon, and I'll reevaluate tomorrow.

Looked for dust or obstructions, found very little in front. Was going to move it away from the wall to look in back, but found the ice first,

I always open the door to a minimum for a minimum time. I'm my mother's son. "It's not going to jump out at you" she would tell my older brother."

Ice makers and water dispensers are some of the reasons I didn't list why I want to fix this one. To buy a new one, one has to decide freezer on top, freezer on the bottom, freezer on the side. Then ice in the door, water in the door, ice maker inside only, or none. (I have none now.) Then decide what color, and they usually only have white (boring), chrome (too shiny), or black (too somber but the best of the three. They never have Harvest Gold to match the stove and range hood, although black and gold were my high school team colors, or some high school. Then you have to decide what brand or brands. Then you have to weighh added features (like shelves that go all the way across or those separately adjustable in the middle) versus price. Then you have to shop for good or decent price. Then you have to pay. Then I have to clean the front hall so they have room to go out and in. I'm worn out just by thinking about this. --- My current fridge was included with the house. No decisions required.

Things like fan motors and thermostats are still easy to get for fridges this old.

This year, I bought a new laptop and put it on the kitchen table to work on it before migrating. I got it looking like Windows 7 and migrated my work to it about a week ago and was ready to take it upstairs, but didn't because of the heat wave coming. It was up to 100F (17C,iicc) for 4 days but the first floor with a table fan remained comfortable the whole time. So I save more and benefit the planet far more by not using AC than I waste by using an old refrigerator. Even when the AC worked I only used it part time for a month or two of the summer. On a comparitively cool day I'd open the windows and let in all the heat and humidity

BTW, the floor of the freezer compartment is made out of plastic and it was still flexible and perfect, not a bit brittle, after 46 years. I don't know if that's because Kenmore makes a quality product or if most/all of them are like that.

I used light dimmers to lower the speed of the table fan to as fast as possible but yet I can't hear it. People told me you need special motor speed controls for fans but I've used this on half a dozen or more fans and only one wouldn't work with the speed control. (I make sure it's never even close to so slow that it stops. I think that might cause a fire???) i've had 3 fans that run this way for 30 years.

No one knows? It's a simple calculation.

Are you an adult? That sort of decision should be trivial.

If you can see the drain hole in the floor of the freezer compartment (behind the panel you removed), try pouring a cup of hot water down the drain. Does the water back up above the drain hole or spill out somewhere into the fridge or elsewhere where it shouldn't be going? Or does it drain into the evaporation pan underneath the fridge? If it drains properly, you likely don't have additional ice build up in the vent channel.

You should check the very bottom of the drain pipe where it empties into the evaporation pan. On my fridge (Whirlpool model from 2018),there is a flexible rubber one way valve right at the termination of the drain pipe. I believe it's to prevent insects from crawling up the vent pipe. When I had an ice buildup, I found a plug of gunk (source unknown) that was sitting in the drain pipe just above the one way valve. It was seriously slowing the flow of melted frost water and probably caused the ice build-up. After removing the gunk, I've had no further problems with ice build-up.

Once I had algae in that spot. Moss, perhaps?

In that totally dark environment inside the drain tube, I guess we could have had a blob of relatively uncommon heterotrophic algae living there. Can't imaging where they would have come from in a home environment. They certainly would be uncommon compared to autotrophic algae you'll find in a swimming pool. Those obtain their carbon via photosynthesis and therefore require light to survive.

All mosses need at least some light to survive, even if not much. I can't believe that there would be any light inside a self-defrosting refrigerator's drain line. My suspicion is that the gunk is the decayed bodies of very small flying insects, such as gnats, that found their way into the pipe through the tiny gap in the rubber flap valve. When they died, they were likely populated by pseudomonas aeroginosa bacteria with their characteristic greenish color. They are ubiquitous in the home environment, especially in and around plumbing fixtures.

Too bad I no longer have access to a lab. I would have stained and mounted some of the gunk for exam under a microscope and would have attempted to culture some and examined what grew.

micky snipped-for-privacy@fmguy.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yeah, life's a bitch.

It was at the very end of the tube, so already outside, in the back just

It could originate from some food inside touching the back wall of the fridge.

Actually, the tubing part inside the fridge had a plastic plug with a stick that went inside the tubing for 4 cm, to manually clean out debris from the mouth of the tube.

Would have been interesting to put a name into it.