For the past 16 years, Bonnie Woolsey has been running All American Appliance Service Inc., the appliance servicing and repair company she founded back in 1994. A skilled professional with more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Woolsey has done everything from selling appliances to managing the companies that repair them. In this article, she tells us the biggest mistakes homeowners make when caring for their refrigerators.
Usually the biggest mistake that homeowners make when it comes to taking care of their refrigerator is just not keeping the condenser coils cleaned. And beyond that, the second biggest issue that comes up is when homeowners don’t take enough care when it comes to the drain line cleaning.
The drain line cleaning comes into play with the vents that are inside each refrigerator and freezer. When those vents are covered by all the food that people stuff inside their freezers, for example, you have a problem. When the freezer eventually goes into a defrost pattern, the little food particles and things of that that nature that are sitting over the vent will inadvertently get sucked into the drain because those vents are not kept clean enough and free of debris.
The other biggest issue that we see out in the field — and we see this a lot — is when a customer sees frost buildup in their freezer and tries to remove it himself. Do not do that. If you see frost or ice building up, call a service technician before trying to do anything yourself. We see way too many people who start to take knives and cutlery, hairdryers, and other items to pluck out the ice and try to get rid of it in some way, and that is just a bad idea. With the knife, you can easily puncture the freezer during the process of trying to get out that ice, and then you will have lost you entire refrigeration system and that will be the end of your refrigerator. We see that all too often. Another bad do-it-yourself idea people try is to attempt to heat the freezer up to get rid of the frost with a hair dryer. The main problem with that is that that plastic that the freezer is made out of can kind of melt, and it can disintegrate what is in between the coils — and obviously that is a problem, too.
Basically when a customer sees ice and/or frost in the freezer, it is a sign that the refrigerator is actually acting up. So the best advice I have is to get a service guy out there as soon as possible. A lot of times when people try to remove that ice they might think it worked at first and it might get back to proper refrigeration. But meanwhile, the homeowner doesn’t see what is going on inside the refrigerator itself — meaning, between those panels, per se. He only sees what is on the surface, and doesn’t realize that something else going on in there that is still wrong and needs to be fixed.
Then, by the time they actually call for a service, there is so much damage to the refrigerator — the insulation and the foam and that kind of thing — that everything actually gets waterlogged. So you want to call for service as soon as an issue comes up, and I don’t advise people to try to babysit that type of problem.
The electronics on refrigerators can become major headaches for people, too. And unfortunately, there really is nothing that a consumer can do to protect himself from that. However, when a homeowner starts noticing changes in temperatures inside the refrigerator, what many customers have the tendency to do is to lower the temperature on those electronic settings to try to make it colder. But really all they are doing with that is deferring air from one compartment of the refrigerator to the other, so cranking the temperature doesn’t really solve the problem.
Turning down the temperature just covers the problem ever so slightly, and again it is going to be more costly in the future by trying to play the guessing game and waiting an extra week or month to call the service company to come out and have a look.
