Friday, November 5, 2010

Refrigerator Life Lesson

The following series of events might make you laugh, but more importantly it's a lesson I painfully learned, and am hoping that you do not have to duplicate.

Last saturday, I cleaned our refrigerator. I seemed to have bumped the temperature control to the off position, which actually is the "off" switch for the fridge and freezer. I don't notice until an hour later, and then turn the control back to 5, where it was before. No harm done, right? Wrong.

A couple hours later, I have a craving for ice cream and when I pull it out of the freezer, it's soup. Uh oh. So I put a glass of warm water in the freezer, and checked an hour later to see if it froze. Nope. I check the fridge and it's at room temperature. Oh crap, the fridge just died, I thought. It's dead silent. I unplug the fridge, plug it back in, nothing. I reset the circuit breaker, nothing. Plug the fridge into another outlet, nothing.

Heather and I go to Sears and buy a new fridge. We also buy a deep freeze to save anything that hasn't thawed yet. The stuff in our fridge that's still OK goes into our mini-fridge downstairs. I unplug the fridge and wait for the new one to be delivered on Monday.

Monday comes, and the delivery people can't install the fridge because there's no water shutoff valve for the fridge. I checked in the basement and couldn't find one. We may have one, but the previous owners finished the basement (which we're grateful for) and likely covered up the valve in the process. So they put the new fridge in the garage and turned it on. They also happened to plug the old fridge back in. Why? I don't know.

Later, I get home from work and guess what, the old fridge works! Are you kidding me?!?!? It died, and was resurrected on the third day. Ice is being made in the freezer, and the fridge is the same temperature as it is outside.

So now we are faced with a dilemma. Return the new fridge? We mulled that over a couple days and decided not to do that, because we'd have to pay the delivery fee and restocking fee (over $200), not to mention that our old fridge has been alive for over 10 years and it could die in the near future. So as soon I can get a shutoff valve installed, the fridges are trading places and the deep freeze is being returned.

So what's the lesson? If you must fool with the temperature gauge on your fridge, only adjust it one "tick" at a time, according to the owner's manual. And if something all of a sudden stops working, stop and think if there's anything you could have done to cause the problem. Yes, all the common sense stuff, which I seem to lack every now and then.