The spare refrigerator lives in the garage because that is where the space is. It is faultless from October to May and then, somewhere in the second half of July, the freezer stops setting properly. Nobody touched anything.
Read the plate on the back
Nearly every refrigerator carries a climate rating stating the ambient range it was designed to work in, and plenty of them stop somewhere around 90 degrees. A closed garage in Walnut Creek passes that by lunchtime in July and stays past it until well after dark.
Above that rating two things happen at once. The condenser cannot dump heat into air that hot, so the compressor runs and runs and still loses ground. And the compressor is running in an ambient its own cooling was never designed for, which is how a machine with fourteen years in it fails at eight.
Why the freezer goes first
On a single-evaporator refrigerator the thermostat deciding when to run sits in the fresh food side. In extreme heat it never stops asking, so the compressor never rests, which sounds as though it should help the freezer and does not, because the condenser is saturated and very little cold is being produced for all that effort.
What actually works
- Cool the space. A gable vent and a fan, or a small split unit, brings the garage back inside the rating. This is the real answer.
- Buy a garage-rated unit. They exist, they are built for this, and they are the right choice where the garage cannot be cooled.
- Move it inside. Obvious, unpopular, and the cheapest of the three.
What does not work is waiting for October. Four months a year of continuous running above rated ambient is what kills these, and when it goes it is the compressor rather than anything inexpensive.
If it has already stopped
Worth a look before you replace it, because a condenser fan that has seized looks exactly like a dead machine and costs a fraction of one.
Call 866-264-9578.
