I am the proud owner of a small (two-foot-high) Diplomat-brand refrigerator. It has served me well, lo these two years.
The freezer compartment is no more than a piece of sheet aluminum molded into an ‘L’ shape and bolted to enclose a corner of the main box. It ices up a lot.
The ice had become so thick that it was obstructing the use of the fridge, both in and outside the freezer compartment (we’re talking a centemeter and a half).
I tried scraping it off with a plastic ruler, and that wasn’t very effective, so I ended up chipping it off the aluminum with a small screwdriver (it’s all I had on hand).
I’d removed about a third of the ice, when all of a sudden I heard a hissing sound and felt a jet of somethingorother blowing against my hand. Soon, I smelled something not unlike WD-40, and my index finger had been anesthitized.
NOTE: I didn’t strike anything but ice and sheet aluminum with my screwdriver. And the alminum really is just a sheet bolted to the inside of the box.
My theory:
I somehow ruptured one of the cooling lines containing refrigerant.
My question:
What do I do? As I type this, The refrigerator compartment, with door closed, is filling with refrigerant. Is it bad that I breathed some of it in? How do I properly dispose of my new box of refrigerant/air mixture? What IS the refrigerant, anyway?
Thanks…
wolfstu, whose finger is still a little numb.
Bad idea. Sharp instruments around cooling coils don’t go together.
Yup, you did.
Open the windows and let the gas out. It won’t kill you.
Since your refrigerator is fairly new, it probably has R-134a type refrigerant.
If you know where the hole is, you can braze it closed and refiill the refrigerator with R-134a that you can get at an auto parts store. This may be more trouble than simply getting a new one off Ebay.
I’ve just checked with a friend who is in the business of fridge/freezer repair.
The gas isn’t toxic in itself (but don’t smoke near it, because the mix of the gas plus the cigarette chemicals is toxic), and repairing the freezer would cost far more, most likely, than just buying a new appliance. In other words, you’re safe, but your fridge/freezer is completely stuffed, mate.
For future reference: Those small handheld steam cleaners work great for defrosting small fridges like these. Still takes awhile but there’s no danger of busting a line.
I know, sharp objects and cooling coils… but I figured I’d be okay; the inner plastic coating was never ruptured, and at the time of failure, the screwdriver was in fact embedded in the ice, a full two centimetres from the nearest wall of the compartment. It may have been kind of dumb, but the thing takes hours to defrost to even the point where I can chip the stuff off more easily.
My new theory:
The aluminum sheet of which is made the freezer compartment is hard-connected to the cooling coils, or the fasteners for the sheet are close to the cooling coils, and my efforts caused deformation of the coils or indirect impact with the coils through motion of the compartment fittings.
The appliance is not new; it was purchased two years ago second-hand. It’s old enough to have a brown finish and faux wood paneling.
Good to know that the stuff isn’t toxic. I ventilated the room as soon as it happened, anyway.
jonfromdenver:
Yeah, I’ve been intending to defrost it for a while. But I had just come home from buying cheese, and all that ice was in the way. It was chip it off to make room, or let the cheese spoil.
But, I managed to get the contents of the now failed refrigerator into a neighbor’s fridge, so life continues.
The appliance is now sitting on the deck, door open, where it’s minus twenty-some Celsius. That’ll teach it a thing or two about icing up.
As for local laws, I’ll have to look into it. I don’t know how much refrigerant is left in there.
ZenBeam:
I suppose that’s a possibility. If that were the case, hammering on it would be really dumb. I figured the cooling lines are inside the walls of the fridge, though it’s conceivable they’re inside that sheet aluminum.
I found a placard on the back of the appliance showing that the refrigerant is, after all, R-12.
Mark’s Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers says it has a toxicity of 1000 ppm, and that it’s generally replaced by R-134a, which it gives as CH[sub]2[/sub]FCF[sub]3[/sub].
I just looked at my old dorm fridge. The freezer compartment wall looks just like an aluminum sheet… except for a serpentine path where it bulges a bit, which is where the coolent flows to cool the whole fridge.
