New refrigerator questions

[Mike S.]

The instructions for the new refrigerator say to keep the four bolts that secure the refrigerator to the shipping case. It says they are for the refrigerator's leveling legs. What am I supposed to do with them? The instructions don't say. Am I supposed to attach them to the bottom of the refrigerator?

Am I also supposed to keep the shipping case they were attached to? Basically, the bottom sides of the refrigerator were bolted to two plastic things that look like short skis. Am I supposed to keep those? The last refrigerator we got was 20 years ago and it didn't come packaged like these new ones are.

Also, shouldn't we wait about 24 hrs before putting the food in the refrigerator? The instructions say to wait that long or the food could spoil. My father thinks we should wait until the temp. reaches 35 degrees even if that's in 12 hrs.

[Appliance Repair Aid]

Hi,

No make or model# mentioned.

After removing the skid, reinstall the legs/bolts in the same spots they came out of.

Not normally, toss it out.

Usually only take 4-6 hours to get close to the correct temp and 24 hours to get into it's on and off routine. Put the food in right away unless you have another place to properly store the food.

jeff. Appliance Repair Aid

[Edwin Pawlowski]

24 hours sounds good on paper, but what do you do iwth the food in the meantime? Put it in as soon as you have to. It will take a little while to get down to temperature, but that is till better than leaving it sit out. If you have the luxury of a second fridge, then let the new one come down to operating temperature. Listen to Dad.

[IBM5081]

Assuming that you have cold/cool food and your old unit is DOA there are several things that you can do:

1. Using a clean container (or one lined with clean plastic) ice down your food to keep it as cool as possible. Try to keep it all in one mass. Plan to consume refrigerated items soon.
2. Assuming that you kept the unit upright in transit, plug it in and set it a bit colder than normal. Make sure that air can circulate well around the cooling coils. Leave the icemaker turned off for now. Point a fan to blow air over the coils to increase heat rejection.
3. Once the new unit has cooled a bit, start moving the frozen foods to the freezer compartment. Hopefully they are still frozen and a refrigerator cools "something" better than it does just cooling the air inside.
4. After the refrigerator side has cooled a bit more, begin placing refrigerator goods in place. Increase the thermal mass this way.
5. Once the unit is fully loaded and is not running continuously, connect and start the icemaker.

[Mike S.]

I don't have the model number at the moment. It's a Kenmore that's manufactured by Whirlpool. My father already went ahead and put the food in the refrigerator without putting those four bolts back in the bottom. Is that gonna cause a problem if they're not in there? The instructions never said to put them back in but only to keep them.

We had the old refrigerator running to keep the food cold. The only reasons we bought a new refrigerator is because the door was broken on the old one. My father tried to fix it several times but only made it worse. But it's probably better that we did get a new one. The old one uses about 1000-1200 kWh/year which is about $100 a year. The new one uses 448 kWh/year which is about $41 a year. We got a good deal on it and it's bigger than the old one so we can put more groceries in it so we don't have to go shopping as much. So we get to save on gas too. Can't beat that.