Yeah - my brother ruined our fridge that way, when we were kids. Old-fashioned, not frost free, bottom-freezer, metal ice trays in a slot, got frozen, he tried to chip one loose.
Re turning it off for 24 hours: If you fill it up thoroughly and DON’T OPEN THE DOOR, it should be OK for 24 hours. You could save milk jugs or other squareish containers, fill them (most of the way) with water, freeze them, and they’ll help keep the other stuff cold.
A word of warning: If this is indeed that drains water into an evaporative pan underneath the fridge, when you locate that pan you are going to find the most GAWD-awful, disgusting thing you have ever seen. It will look like some science experiment that crawled underneath the bed of a thirteen-year-old boy and died.
The goop and dust and nasties collect there, and that is probably the crud that has plugged up the drain hose.
The first one of those I’d ever encountered had the dubious advantage of being screwed to the refrigerator frame, so I couldn’t take it out and dump (and FLUSH) the contents. I had to use the dip and soak method of getting the liquid out, and THEN I got to clean the stupid thing.
Shit, I’m gonna have nightmares tonight.
Oh, and the way it was screwed to the refrigerator frame had the sharp end of the bolt sticking up into the pan. I sliced myself a couple of times on it, and then I got to worry I’d develop some nasty, wasting infectious disease.
~VOW
Unplug won’t do much - even if you leave it open and it actually defrosts completely - if the problem is the timer is gone, the coils will freeze over in about 3 weeks anyway.
If the drain is plugged, you will get a flood on the floor as the ice melts.
If you are really lucky, the timer was stuck and this gets it turning again.
Don’t pick at anything; don’t do anything that could puncture the cooling coils.
The pan (theoretically) will usually be dry, since the small amount of water also benefits from the hot air off the condenser coils being blow across it… unless (a) the drain is not plugged but (b) there’s a whole lot of ice in he coils that melt at once… Depends ho humid your environment is.
even if the drain isn’t plugged you still could get a flood. i think the pan is big enough to hold the water during a normal operating frost free defrost action. the amount of liquid contained in the freezer and insulation that would come out during a total defrost will be much larger than the pan. if you don’t have auto defrost or have it shut off you will get more water.
Just a bump
I tried all the previously recommended posts and nothing worked until i did what is in the above link. Later, Jaxon
Thanks for tips but can’t figure it out.
There’s a visible, accessible drain pan at rear bottom, with about one-half-inch tube extruding from the fridge just above drain pan. I assume this is the tube that carries water that drips into drain pan. But since only one-half-inch of this tube is visible, there’s no way to clean the tube without taking the refrig panels apart to expose the tube, correct?
“Cooling coils”: Are these supposed to be visible? Or do I remove something–an interior/exterior panel–to expose them? If so, and the panel is fastened by something other than screws, how would I remove the the panel? How do I know whether, if I “pop” the fasteners, I won’t break something?
Timer: I don’t see anything that looks like a timer. So again, I have to disassemble the refrigerator and look for it?
This confirms something my grandpop told me years ago: things are usually not designed for ease-of-maintenance and repair.
Can you access the tube well enough to poke something up it to clear it out? Something like the stick from those little flags the utilities use when they mark the ground before digging?
ZenBeam:
“Can you access the tube well enough to poke something up it to clear it out? Something like the stick from those little flags the utilities use when they mark the ground before digging?”
Yeah, tried that, didn’t feel any obstruction.
More info: in refrig compartment interior, on the top (ceiling?), there are two rectangular openings, one on each side. I assume this is where the water was dripping from. I feel ice/frost in these openings. I assume this is from the frost building up in the freezer? Which would explain why water is no longer dripping and pooling in refrig compartment–the holes thru which the water was dripping are now blocked by frost.
Looks like a fix job for a pro–
Lynn, why won’t you try what i recommended?
The Permanent Cure for Repeatedly Freezing Condensate Drains in Whirlpool-Roper-Kitchenaid Top-Mount Refrigerators
I’m certain this is your problem.
Later,
Jaxon…
The article by Jaxon is a good one. You do have to be willing to disassemble your freezer compartment, however, to get to it. My problem wasn’t the same (mine is a side by side), but the solution in that article would have fixed it. No, my problem was a bit different…
About 5 years ago, I bought a fridge from a guy on craigslist. A nice side by side, maybe 3 years old (I later discovered it was built in 2002, so that’s about right), glass shelves, ice & water through the door, the retail price at the time was about $1800. He sold it to the first $100 that came along, which happened to be me. He told me that he bought it a couple of years ago, but after a few months or so, it started leaking water out of the bottom. He said he called on the warranty and they sent a guy out and “fixed it” and it was fine for another few months, when it started leaking again. So, he just put it in his garage for a “beer/soft drink” fridge and bought a new one for the house. After a year or so with the new fridge, he said his wife wanted a new, stainless steel one with the drawer freezer at the bottom, so the new fridge was going in the garage and he had to get rid of the leaking one.
So, I take it home and find the drain to be clean and everything looks fine. I plug it in and everything works (I don’t hook up the ice maker; it hadn’t been hooked up in that guy’s garage either). Being a bachelor at the time, I just had it in the corner of my kitchen and used it only for beer; my main fridge (freezer on top unit) held my food. It ran fine that way for a year or so.
Then, I went and got married and moved into my wife’s house. Her fridge was older and more decrepit than my main fridge, so I moved the new one into her (now, our) house. It worked fine and she was very happy until after a few months, it began to leak out of the freezer. Since I hooked up the icemaker when I put in, I thought maybe that was the problem. The leak wasn’t bad so we just lived with it.
After a month or so, I noticed black flakes in the ice. The coating on the icemaker was failing, so I bought a new icemaker off eBay (it seems there are only two kinds of icemakers used in the majority of fridges) and installed it. During that installation, I found a hose clamp had not been installed on one of the water lines. AHA! I thought. That was the problem.
Unfortunately, I did not follow the advice mentioned upthread and I left the unit plugged in while I was replacing the icemaker (I had turned the thermostat off, but the light still worked inside, which made working on installing the icemaker a lot easier). Anyway, while I was in the process of taking the panel off the rear of the freezer compartment to inspect the evaporator, my new wife heard me make a “NNNYYYYYGGGGG” noise when I discovered a live wire and made me cease and desist further work, so I buttoned everything back up and everything worked fine. We had clean ice, it didn’t leak, I thought that the missing hose clamp must have been the problem.
Until another few months passed. Then, water started flowing out of the bottom. At first, my wife ignored it, not wanting me to open it up again, so we ended putting up with it for at least a year. Eventually, though, I had enough. We emptied it and I pulled it from the wall, unplugged it, and removed all the ice that had built up in the bottom. I then removed the back panel and inspected the evaporator coils. In the bottom of the drain pan, I found a 1985 penny, which just happened to cover the drain hole. I removed the penny, blew out the drain hose and put it back together. It has work just fine every since; better than it ever did. I just wish I had seen that article before I fixed it since that copper wire fix is an excellent idea.
I suspect that penny had been there since day one. It fit over the drain hole, but probably did not make a water tight seal. When the defrost cycle ran, the water would leak past it, just not as fast. Eventually, frost and ice would build up around it so that it would make an ice plug that would not melt during the defrost cycle. When I moved it to my bachelor house, the penny got dislodged and wasn’t a problem. When it moved into my wife’s house, it moved back.
So, maybe something has gotten itself in the drain pan and is stopping it up. Disassembling it to install the copper wire as described in that article would find anything. Anyway, good luck
excavating (for a mind)
Jaxon, thanks for the article, and I’m sure the instructions work for someone who knows what the author is talking about–but I don’t.
I assume the photos show mechanisms/devices that are visible and accessible only after disassembly, correct? If so, I wish the author had stated so with specific disassembly instructions. How would an inexperienced novice remove the covers/panels that hide these mechanisms if the covers/panels are attached by fasteners other than screws? Do I stick a screwdriver head, or knife, under the fastener heads and try to pop them out, hoping I don’t break something?
That’s the kind of thing I did as a kid, and usually the results were bad…whadda ya think?
To end the tremendous suspense and “gain closure”–The problem was a bad thermostat.