In article
,
"William R. Walsh" wrote:

Hello all...

I bought a secondhand fridge (a Franklin Chef FCD401BL) a few months
ago for use in a house where I am only storing stuff. This fridge uses
R134A refrigerant. The heat in the house is only kept on minimally,
set to about 45-50 degrees.

There has been a lot of cold weather and wind blowing around the old
house, and the temperature at the ends of the house drops to about 36
degrees Fahrenheit. It was around 44 in the room where the fridge is.
I dropped into check on things and that's when I noticed the fridge
(in particular the freezer compartment) was not working. I have
thermometers in both compartments, and both were at around 35 degrees.

I turned the heat up in the house and the fridge began to work
normally. I've also heard from other people who have told me that new
refrigerators they bought stopped working temporarily when used in
cold places.

I've never seen an older refrigerator that would behave in this way--
usually they'd just keep right on working even in the bitterest of
cold environments. I'm curious to know might have changed between old
and new--surely it wouldn't be a question of the refrigerant...or
would it?

Could it maybe be that the fridge in question was working, just not
frequently enough to keep the freezer compartment cold enough? Many
fridges, probably all the cheaper/simpler models, only have one
thermostat and one cooling system shared by both the freezer and the
fridge compartments. The fridge I had to monkey with the most, a couple
of units ago, had as far as I could tell the thermostat in the fridge
section and the evaporator basically in the freezer compartment. The
so-called freezer control seemed to merely operate a damper that
controlled how quickly the freezer air could move into the fridge
compartment.

If your fridge was set up something like this, there might not be
sufficient heat gain in the fridge section to cause the compressor to
run very much in order to maintain the proper fridge temperature.

One other unrelated thing to check is that the defrost mechanism is
working properly. The reason I got familiar with the fridge described
above was because the defroster died (probably the timer), and the
evaporator would periodically get choked up with ice, blocking the
airflow through it and making the fridge--especially noticeable in the
freezer--ineffective. The temporary solution was to disassemble the
freezer compartment floor to get access to the evaporator and thaw it
out with heat lamps, fans, etc. The permanent solution was to complain
to my landlords, who replaced the fridge (which was getting rather old)
with a new one that worked properly.

--
Andrew Erickson

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot
lose." -- Jim Elliot