Stupid Samsung fridge shut down again

May 09, 2018 3 Replies
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I have had major problems with my old Whirlpool fridge (actually made by Samsung) and now with a Samsung badged fridge where is just shuts down apparently caused by a power glitch. So, I purchased a neat little unit to monitor the temperature inside the box and report to me via email, if the temp is exceeded. This is a Lascar unit using their EasyLog system. Yesterday, I was home when we opened the fridge to find the lights not working, a sure sign that the fridge decided to stop cooling. The temp displayed on the Samsung was 44, it's usually 37 for the refrigerator part. My wife then opened the refrigerator drawer and the freezer drawer to see if it had lights and indeed it did. Then she reopened the refrigerator and the lights were back and the compressor started running. I'm guessing that opening the freezer drawer somehow bumped the stuck processor out of its stuck state. All seemed fine. I didn't notice any power glitched, but it was daylight. There were some showers in the area. My UPS on the computer didn't report anything. Previous occurrences required me to remove power and then reapply ... sounds like Microsoft!



But the cool thing is that later I looked at my emails to see an email telling me that the temperature had been exceeded. Really nice unit from Lascar. Too bad I had to spend the $120 to "fix" an obviously bad design. Soapbox warning: To Samsung; refrigerators are supposed to run



24/7/365 under all conditions. It is just plain stupid for the unit to be stuck in a state like these models (both the Whirlpool badged Samsung and a real Samsung unit. Samsung need to fix their stuff or just keep out of the fridge business and keep making good printers.
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T

It's also possible that it's some bug that has nothing to do with a power glitch. It could be some timing or race condition in the design, where if some certain event happens inside a certain window, it winds up going off the reservation. Car computers and similar have watchdog timers that force a reset if the CPU doesn't hit a certain address or port every X Msecs. You'd think fridges would have the same, but who knows.

Have you googled to find if this is a problem others are having and if there was any solution? It's a tough one, because you have no way of knowing if it's just a bad controller board or if you buy another board for $$$ it's still going to do the same thing. Maybe try a UPS if you can find one cheap?

Another thought, you said that opening and closing the freezer door got it going again. I know my Kitchenaid will turn off the light if the door is open long enough. I've seen it do that while cleaning it. IDK what it does with the cooling. Is it possible that a bad door switch is causing it to think the door is open and it shuts off due to that? I guess you could leave a door or doors open for awhile and see if the compressor turns off after awhile. If so, it might be a door switch that's a bit shot, sometimes looks open when it shouldn't. I would not be surprised if most or all new fridges turn off if left open as part of some green energy directives, etc.

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I know of problems others have had. I'd go with bad design because now I have seen this in 2 different Samsung refrigerators.

None of the times this occurred, has the door been open. I still go with a naive newby designer that didn't consider all the problems that can and will happen. I remember an engineer telling me of a race condition found in a system they designed. They convinced themselves that the conditions would never occur all at the same time to cause the problem. In the 1st field test of the system, the fault occurred.

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The door doesn't have to be open, the door switch just needs to be defective, making intermittent contact. It's like a home alarm system that goes off randomly because one of the switches has become less than

100% reliable. That assumes that it works like I think it might, ie if the door is open long enough, it will shut down. IDK if that's true or not, but you could test it.
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