"Paul ( Skiing8 )" wrote in message
...
"Roly" wrote in message
...
The drain hole of the refrigerator section of my Neff fridge/freezer is
freezing up and the defrost water is not draining away. The fridge goes
through the defrost cycle but the ice built up is so thick in just a day
or
two that it doesn't melt before it starts to frost again. Consequently
the
defrost water lies in the bottom of the fridge.

I've cleaned around the drain outlet so that's not the cause.

Is a faulty thermostat likely to be the cause?


Hi

I had the same problem with my fridge...... I tried everything and asked
for
advice and one answer came back that I thought it couldn't be but it was.
Turns out that the foam insulation aroung the drain hole at the back of
the
fridge got some water in it, this freezes up and then causes the drain to
freeze. My drain had a small crack in it that caused the leak.

Before you say yes, mine is the same have you tried melting the ice with
hot
water. Before I set about fixing it I melted the ice plug so that the
drain
was clear and any water would easily drain away. You might just have
something blocking the pipe that needs clearing.

How to fix...... quite hard but possible.

I loosened the coils at the back(couldn't remove as they are connected) to
gain access to the back of the fridge, I cut through the plastic cardboard
material to expose the foam aroung the drain. Then I carefully poked and
chipped the foam away around the drain, this is where you need to be
carefull as there was a cooling pipe near and you dont want to dammage it.
I
then took the un-necessary step of completly removing the drain which was
glued onto the back of the fridge. I cleaned everything up and patched the
little crack in the drain and hot glued it back in place.

I didn't bother with the next step which was suggested that you re-foam
the
area, I didn't think it was necessary for such a small area, I just put a
couple of layers of the plastic cardboard material back in and taped it up
so that if it happened again I could get at it easily.

The place where I got advice from was www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk , They have a
message forum with some great people there.

check out the thread describing my problem and fix
http://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/module...ewtopic&t=1633

cheers
Paul



Thanks Paul for the detailed reply. Yes, I have tried melting the ice with
hot water but it's frozen again within a day or two.

I've read your thread on the whitegoods forum and it seems very likely that
mine is also caused by the insulation icing up.

It's also a built in unit which makes it more of a problem and it's already
been out once as I thought that it just needed cleaning, but it didn't. The
coil is riveted to the cabinet so I'll need to drill them out for access
behind.

To save having to cut away the insulation do you think that a hair drier
might dry it out? If that would work it would save having to release the
coil.

Roly