Looking Out To Sea

Last week I pulled some butter out of the fridge and thought it felt a bit soft. The temperature display inside the fridge said +5 which is the upper limit for most purposes, so I pressed the “cooler” button a couple of times so that it would aim at +2 degrees and forgot about it.

On Friday night it was definitely on +5 and feeling distinctly warm. There wasn’t much we could do about it at the time. We tried the IT support routine (turn it off, turn it back on again) and went to bed in the hope that things would have stabilised by the next day. On Saturday morning the milk had turned and it was about 6 degrees Celsius inside the fridge. Thankfully the freezer was operating as normal.

I was willing to go delving if need be but I tried doing some research first. The manual was basically useless but it did have the model number writ large so I could search for it.

The ADM6855 is a common fridge/freezer combined unit for fitted kitchens, and it has a design flaw. It’s a “parasite” design, whereby the cooling mechanism works on the freezer and a separate fan extracts cold air to cool the fridge when necessary. This suffers a similar problem to the vacuum cleaners of old — when the cooling elements get clogged with ice they don’t allow air to flow and so the fan is sucking on empty. The slow clogging of elements hides what’s happening until one day your butter’s all soft because there’s not enough cool air making it through. I imagine in its final moments the same suction through constricted airways causes the elements to freeze up even faster.

Anyway, that’s what happens, and that’s what I had to undo. As I said, it’s a design flaw so reversing the effect is not as simple as scraping ice off the inside of the freeze box. It’s not the kind of procedure you’re expected to perform at home, and there’s no mention in the user guide. I found some great instructions for the process, which basically involved a 48h defrost or some disassembly and hairdryer work on the frozen elements. I chose the latter because I wanted to get our frozen food out and back again before it all wasted.

Well I did the deed and the fridge has been operating at the desired temperature now for two days. We shall have to see how long it takes before this happens again. I don’t know if there’s anything in particular we can do to avoid the problem because we don’t know (1) what causes it; (2) whether it’s new or recurrent; (3) if it’s happened before, what date the previous owners dealt with it; and so on. We’ve been here 18 months now without issue, and I don’t think the previous owners will have defrosted the freezer just before they left. (Unless the fridge was turned off when we got here? I can’t remember, but I seem to recall they had left us a bottle of fizz in the fridge as a gift, so it must have been working.) We can’t even tell how quickly it’s frosting over again because it’s so deeply buried in the back of the freezer. I’m guessing some kind of airflow gauge inside the fridge would be able to tell if the fan was pulling in cool air or just sucking on empty. Next time we’ll know what to do, anyway.

I should also send an email to the writer of that guide for providing excellent instructions.