Fridge is about 6 yrs old and I got it as part of me buying a vacation house. The freezer temp setting is pinned at 9 (coldest) while the fridge is on 5 (right between hottest and coldest setting). I don’t have temp numbers yet but it seems like the compressor will run most of the time like 5 hrs on then maybe 45 min off (didn’t time the off time).
Today I pulled it out to vacumme the coils, but the coilds are on a spiral sheetmetal piece around a fan, got as much dust out as I could.
what else can it be besides buying a new fridge?
Fridge is at 37F, freezer is at 10F
Well, your temps aren’t terrible, but they sound a little high.
In a recent thread, I was reminded that a home freezer should be closer to 0, and I think the refrigerator should probably be around 33 to 34 (my memory here is fuzzy, you’ll want to check that figure).
If the external coils are fairly clean (and make sure that the fan they’re wound around is running and moving air), and the interior coils aren’t covered with ice, then it sounds like your compressor isn’t keeping up with the cooling load as well as it should. In other words, it’s obviously still working, but working much more than it should to keep things cold.
This could be many things, but most commonly that the compressor itself is going bad, or that the system has lost some refrigerant through a slow leak. This is the kind of thing you need some specific equipment to check, so you’d probably have to call a repairman.
Assuming you’ve just lost some refrigerant through a loose fitting or some other simple to fix leak, it used to cost around $100 to $150 to have a repairman come, check it out, fix a simple leak, then evacuate and refill the system. If you have to replace the compressor, my guess is it would be $300 to $400, minimum, possibly much more.
But it’s been 15 years since I had contact with that industry, so it may have changed since then.
I can’t quite picture this arrangement, but there are two things I would look at:
- is there a way to take off the shield (if that was what you were describing) in order to do a really thorough job of dusting? (I don’t rely on the vacuum for mine, getting a narrow feather duster and really reming out the area.)
- is the access to the back of the fridge (where I assume your coils are) open? If there is no way for the air to cycle back to the coils, they can be sparkling clean and you’ll still build up heat that will make them inefficient.
OK those temps are a little premature. After some more time the fridge temp is 35F and the freezer is 1.9F. I have backed off the freezer temp from pinned at 9 to 8 and see what happens.
The coils are, well think of a strip of metal that is 1 foot by 10 feet. This has a long U shaped freon tube inbedded (well a series of U’s). This strip of metal is ‘rolled’ into a spiral shape (well a square spiral shape). A fan that I think also cools the compressor is attached to one open end of the spiral.
Anyway, I couldn’t get a good cleaning but did remove some dust. Also itlooks like there is a good airflow path.
Fridge temp of 37 degrees is just fine; if it gets down lower than that, you might start getting icy slush in your milk, or having your grapefruit get gritty and nasty (when the fridge runs, it’ll go lower, then let itself warm up, then run again, etc., so if it’s 34 degrees, it might go below 32 when it cycles). Freezer temp is best right around 0 degrees.
Also, if this is a fridge that you’ve just recently plugged in, it’s best to let it run for a few days before trying to fine-tune the temp settings. For reasons that escape me, it’s said that a fridge needs to “settle in.” Even though I don’t understand it, I know that when I’m away for more than a couple of weeks, I empty and unplug my fridge (saves a lot of electricity). When I get home and fire it up again, it’s always a little wonky for the first day or two.
Ditto for changing the settings. It seems to take a while for the fridge to settle down. So, you can’t change the settings, check it an hour later, fiddle some more, check, etc. Small changes over the course of a few days is the way to proceed.
Ok just found out that the 9 setting on the freezer is only recommended for short times. It runs the compressor pretty much continously. The air space in the back heats up and limits how low it can go.
I have set the freezer to about 8 and the temp acually fell to -4F, now trying 6.
So as far as I know the freezer was pretty much running this way for about a year, guess I can expect a shortened life out of it - at least i’t running better now.
You might also check the door seals on this refrigerator. If they are old (stiff, cracked) they won’t seal right, and the leaking air will force the compressor to run more often to attempt to hold the temperature you’ve set.
The old amateur test used to be to close the door with a dollar bill in the seal, then try pulling it out. If you could pull it out too easily, the door seals/hinges weren’t working properly and needed to be fixed. But I don’t have a clue as to what “too easily” means here – I haven’t much experience in pulling money out of refrigerators.