Bowing of cooling panel inside fridge

What would cause the cooling panel at the back of a fridge to expand a couple of inches into the food compartment? You can see it in this photo. The bowing over most of the large cooling panel at the rear is NOT a curved part of the design.

The panel expanded within 24 hours and pushed the top shelves out of their supports. It's a BEKO model CF5015APW.

Has something has happened within the cooling element itself?

someone left the door ajar and there is a mass of ice pushing out the panel.

Auto defrost/frost free? Any ice/frost has turned to water during a auto defrost cycle but the drain hole is blocked and the water has become ice again but now in an inappropriate place. On my fridge the drain leads to a pipe which terminates in a open tray on top of the compressor. In normal use the compressor runs hot which evaporates the water in the tray. Perhaps the pipe on your fridge is blocked?

Just thinking that though cannot see the picture. Normally you can defrost completely and hope it goes back. Its the moisture it has let in.

Brian

Pamela was thinking very hard :

Water has got behind the panel and turned to ice, ice takes up much more space than water, so it expanded and pushed the panel out.

That needs to be left off for a good while and the water somehow drain from behind the panel. The panel might or might not regain its normal shape.

The drain hole inside the fridge isn't blocked but I'll check for a blockage in the long drain tube at the back which carries water to the drip tray.

The fridge was turned up in the recent hot spell and maybe that caused it.

The fridge was turned up in the hot spell last week but this happened a few days later.

Could the ice be from room air somehow getting inside the cooling panel? Perhaps at the back, as the interior is one continuous piece of plastic broken only by the drain hole.

Pamela pretended :

Possibly, or the drain hole is choked up feeding water into the insulation. Once water gets in, it can be very difficult to get it out.

A length of plastic-covered curtain wire is good for this; wiggle it gently down until it goes all the way through. Is this a stand-alone fridge? A fridge-freezer with a single compressor has a superheat panel in the fridge for cooling the fridge and heating the refigerant. It's basically an over-gassed freezer and needs the panel to stop liquid from getting back to the compressor. It should defrost on every cycle and ice shouldn't build up anyway. Too much gas might do this but has a good chance of wrecking the compressor. A twin-motor FF or a seperate fridge has a proper evaporator and might get a build up of ice.

The fridge freezer has only one compressor. A curtain wire finds no blockage in the drain pipe.

The panel no longer sticks out so firmly but pushes back easily although it won't stay there. Where did all that ice go, as there are no water marks on the floor at the back?

If it melted slowly it would have evaporated. The water goes into a pan on top of the pot (compressor); a lot of ice melting rapidly would have overflowed - it's to deal with frost and a small amount of ice on the superheat panel. It's stayed bent because it's three dimensional - has very little 'spring'. The danger is taht it won't drip into the little channel at the back.

Note: any typos etc. are due solely to excess beer spirit - distilled from beer to 41% and tastes like a single malt.

This happened to my beloved fridge freezer last night

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