Re: Refrigerator monitor ideas?

[ddl@danlan.*com (Dan Lanciani)]

In article <KvidnYy2RcSdP1nYnZ2dnUVZ_ternZ2d@xxxxxxx>, ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx (Robert Green) writes:

| I *did* have a professional come out to look at it when we
| first moved in.  He absolutely assured me the compressor was shot and I
| needed either a new compressor or a new refrigerator.  I was going to scrap
| it at that point, but I took it apart, noticed the coil freezeup, cleaned
| the stuck drain tube and let it sit.  When I started it up again a day later
| it was fine.  So much for the advice of "professionals."

Some years ago I made the mistake of replacing a 1959-vintage stainless
Tappan with a (supposedly) "top of the line" efficient KitchenAid.  The
first things I noticed were that the compressor ran almost all the time
and the temperature in the refrigerator section varied wildly.  It was
necessary to tweak the controls depending on ambient temperature and even
if you got it right for a particular pattern of use, leaving it for a few
days without opening the door would result in things freezing.  The repair
folks claimed that this was all normal and a result of the high efficiency,
achieved in part by sizing the cooling system with minimal capacity required
for steady-state operation.

I can buy the efficiency argument, but I'd rather sacrifice a little
efficiency to have the reserve capacity to bring the temperature back
down quickly.  Moreover, the poor temperature regulation was not mainly
a function of the "efficient" design.  The real problem was that cooling
of the refrigerator section was achieved by a constantly running fan that
blew cold air from the freezer section through a manually adjusted baffle.
The compressor cooled only the freezer directly and was controlled by a
thermostat in the refrigerator.  Lack of active control of the fan and
baffle was bad enough, but to top things off the thermostat was right in
the path of the cold air entering the refrigerator from the freezer.  All
of this struck me more as cost-reduction and poor design than efficiency
improvement.  That refrigerator lasted about seven years during which an
extended service contract (unusually) paid for itself.  Every major part
(including the compressor at least? once) had to be replaced.

I replaced the KitchenAid with a SubZero which was very expensive but
which has entirely separate cooling systems for the refrigerator and
freezer sections.  In retrospect the Tappan must have been a very clever
design.  It had only one compressor but there was no air path between
(bottom) freezer refrigerator sections.  I'm pretty sure that it had
coils in both sections, though people keep telling me I must have imagined
this.  However it worked, it worked well...

Getting back to your problem, I might be inclined to try an electromechanical
solution.  Could you arrange a slow-moving arm (motor geared way down) in
the area where the ice dam forms?  When the arm ices up the motor stalls
(or a clutch slips) and this can be detected.  As a bonus it might help
slow the formation of a blockage in the first place.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@danlan.*com