In article ,
Adam Funk writes:
On 2011-11-23, Andrew Gabriel wrote:

In article ,
Adam Funk writes:
Our Bosch fridge-freezer, just over 3 years old, has a failing
frost-free system that a local technician has deemed uneconomical to
repair; he also said that he has a non-frost-free fridge-freezer at
home, because the frost-free gubbins, while usually reliable, are so
outrageously expensive to fix if they go wrong. (A technician in a
shop admitted the same thing to me.) Does anyone want to comment on
this?

Bog standard non-frost-free are extremely reliable, barring a period
almost 30 years ago just after the banning of CFC-expanded foam
insulation, where some unsuitable alternatives were used instead
which became water-logged after about 10 years.

The frost free mechanism won't come close to this in terms of
reliability, so I would challenge his assertion about "usually
reliable", and say the frost free mechanism is usually the cause
of breakdown.

Well, I think what he actually said was something along these lines:
many of them don't break and then they're fine, but when they do,
they're not worth trying to repair (because of the cost of the spare
parts).

The parts that fail are usually quite cheap (e.g. a thermister).
Trouble is that diagnosis and repair is well beyond the
capabilities of most repair technicians, so you'll either
spend a fortune on their time and parts they wrongly replace
by trial and error because they don't know what they're doing,
or they'll just tell you it's beyond repairing, because they
know they can't diagnose the problem.

So he's almost right - they're not worth trying to repair,
but it's because the diagnosis is beyond the capabilities of
the repair technician, not because the parts are expensive.
The end result is the same, however.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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