CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[stefuel]

My fridge $hit the bed. I found a bad soldered joint at a resistoron the main board. The body of the resistor has heated so much that the body has turned pink and all the color bars look the same. Out of circuit it measures 25 ohms. I've removed the resistor and prepaired the board for a new resistor. Should I go with 25 ohms?

[jkruger]

Post the make and model number of the fridge and maybe someone has a schematic.

[ecrabb]

That's weird - my fridge just sh*t the bed, too. Well, actually it pissed the basement to be more accurate... Mother-F'er... First, the damn ice filler line froze up right at the cube tray. Then, before I could get to it to defrost it, the ice maker must have called for water for some reason (even though I had it shut off), the filler valve opened, and then apparently because of the back pressure, it couldn't close properly. Then, because it was frozen solid inside, the water had no where to go but around the rubber nipple on the on the end of the nylon line, and back out the fill line "conduit", where it ran onto the floor and into the basement... for about a day before I found it. Several towels, rolls of paper towels, a small shop-vac full of water, and about 4 hours of dicking around defrosting, mopping, cleaning, moving food back and forth, etc. and I think I have a handle on it.

I picked up a replacement valve at the appliance parts shop today... $65 with tax. That's on top of the $150 ice maker that I put in about two years ago. The fridge is only 4 1/2 years old. It's a nice Kitchen Aid, but it's made by Whirlpool. Whirlpool is junk. FYI.

SC

[stefuel]

This one's about 5 years old. It's failed 4 times. Two times under warrantee and two times not. The previous failures were the defrost heater failure. This time, the evaporator fan circuit has failed.

[ecrabb]

Appliances are just junk now!!! What ever happened to "durable goods"??!?! This stuff is just CRAP!

The fridge is 4 1/2 years old and will now have had a water valve and an ice maker assembly.

The dishwasher is the same age and has had a door tensioner break once! It was cheap braided NYLON ROPE molded into a NYLON PLASTIC hook end - this is what's hold the damn door up!!! Now the control panel on the top of the door... The plastic that covers the membrane buttons is cracking on the start button. I bet we haven't pushed that button more than 7- or 800 times!!! The guy at the parts shop told me I have to replace the entire control panel, and that's expensive. So, it's junk, but it's expensive junk!

SC

[stefuel]

My dishwasher failed last year. I replaced it with a Bosch and don't regret spending the extra money one bit.

[kal]

[kal]

[draganm]

I think the expected life expectancy of a major appliance was traditionaly about 10 years and they would routinley last 15. however the same kind of "get rich quick" mentality that crippled our economy has also pervaded our manufacturing as well. TV's, appliances, all that stuff is designed to fail in 5 years or if not outright fail then simply be disfunctional enough to compell you to replace it. It's dusgusting really, even if only 500 million people on the planet own a fridge can you imagine 500 million refrigerators going to the dump every 5 years?
As long as we keep buying this crap though they will keep making it. it's no longer enough to just look at a name brand like Whirlpool and assume it's good. You really have to look at everything carefully, things like plastic hinges and latches, plastic screws where there should be metal, etc. That and read as mcuh as you can on the web. This way you might wind up with a few good things if not all.

[jkruger]

I don't buy much new stuff, especially large appliances. I buy used stuff that has a good track record. Tried and true is better than new.

[ecrabb]

Not to defend the new stuff, but part of the problem is the complexity. A refrigerator used to do one thing: Keep sh*t cold. It had a mechanical thermostat, a compressor, a defroster, and a light bulb - all in a big box with a divider. That's about it. The only thing that could really fail was a thermostat or a compressor. Now, most fridges have water filtration, water dispenser, ice maker, ice dispenser with crusher, electronically-controlled inlet valves, digital controls, new-fangled refrigerant with high-efficiency compressor, variable-speed fans... All KINDS of sh*t to fail! It's like a simple 60's carburated car with a manual transmission compared to a new car with windows, locks, moonroof, nav, EFI, AT, ABS, airbags... Its complex!

In fairness to the Kitchen Aid fridge I have, I did notice that while there was a 1-year warranty on the entire fridge, there's a 5-year warranty on the cooling system. So, hopefully the relatively simple cooling system itself will last awhile. Unfortunately, the other sh*t will probably nickel-and-dime me to death over that period of time. Still, I can't imagine my expensive refrigerator going to the landfill anytime in the next decade or so.

One thing that really pisses me off is the overwhelming sharing of components. The water inlet valve in the $2500 fridge is the same POS plastic-and-pot-metal water inlet valve that's on every other Whirpool fridge, right on down the most basic models with water/ice. In fact, the $2500 fridge is basically just the $799 model with a more expensive material wrapped around it, and a few more features that probably add $100 in real cost.

SC

[stefuel]

Well anyway, to get back on track for a minute, I whacked a 22 ohm resistor where the 25 ohm was and the new fan still won't come on unless I spin it by hand to get it going. I did that last nite and it's been running ever since. I did a lot of searching around an it seems that the board failure is most often caused by a bad thermistor that is part of the evaporator fan assembly. As I don't trust it to start on it's own, I ordered a new board for $125.00 plus shipping. I can't afford to keep throwing food away and it always seems to fail when it's full.

[ecrabb]

$125 for a board is better than $1250 for a new fridge. At least we can diagnose and repair this stuff ourselves and don't have to spend $150 to have somebody come out to the house every time something breaks... Only to have them say, "This is broken. You need a new one these. That'll be $275, please."

Take a nice high-res photo of the new board before you install it so if it gets smoked again, you'll be able tell what was what.

SC

[stefuel]

That would be OK if I planed to give it another chance but this is it. Next time it fails I'm going to paint a bullseye on it, take out my Detonics 45 and blow some holes in it

[schmoe]

I hear ya. My fridge fell into a coma a couple weeks ago (top half of the freezer was warm, bottom half of the fridge was freezing vegetables), and since I already paid bookoo bucks to repair it last time it died, I decided to scrap the darn thing and get a new one. They must be programmed to die in Spring.

[stefuel]

So I recieved my new board and it's different. It looks to be some sort of universal replacement. The instructions say to eliminate the thermistor wire from pin 2 of J1 IF it's a bottom freezer or "Encoder model" with certain model no prefix. I don't know what a "Encoder Model" is but my fridge had the correct prefix (SF2) in the serial no so I snipped the wire. It didn't work. Lucky for me that I snipped the wire in a place that I could get at so I stripped the ends and put them together with a temp jumper wire and it's working fine.................so far

There is nothing on this fridge that indicates a model name just the manufacturer (GE).