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South Georgia | Has anybody tried to do their own refrigerator repair? This house had a fancy French door stainless steel LG refrigerator in it when I moved in a year ago. Everybody oohed and aahed over how awesome it was. I agree, it looked very snazzy. A couple days ago, wifey said it started making a noise. When I got home, it was indeed making noise and the compressor was running constantly. It was getting progressively warmer inside, so the next day I called a refrigerator guy. He didn't sound real excited about it on the phone, but he came and looked. Can't repair it, sealed system, no license to open a sealed system and do refrigerant work. Sorry, throw it away and get a new one. No charge for service call, have a nice day. Hm. Okay, I don't know how old this thing is, but its not very old. These things are like a couple grand, aren't they? We can't recharge a refrigerator anymore? Really?
Well, I asked that guy to recommend somebody else who might could repair it. He told me somebody, they told me somebody else who came and pretty much gave me the same story. NOT cool. We can send a man to the moon, but we can't repair a stupid refrigerator? Really? Oh wait, we can't send a man to the moon anymore either. My bad.
Okay, so since it's an emergency, I bought a new refrigerator. Just a normal refrigerator that looks like a refrigerator, not one that looks like a walk in cooler. Now I have time to do some research. There are no charge ports on the lines, which didn't surprise me. The compressor runs, but the line temperatures don't move significantly. Okay, neat find, it takes r-134a. For about six bucks I can buy a deal to pierce the suction line to give me a charge port. As soon as it gets here, I'll top it off and see if it cools. If so, I'll see if it doesn't leak back out in a week. If not, it's going back in service until it gives another problem.
I also found that the evaporator fan had failed. $30 or so, ordered from Amazon.
This is more of a rant than anything else, I guess, but this is really ridiculous. Two repair guys told me to throw away a $2000 refrigerator, when quite possibly it only needs a half can of freon and a $39 fan. This completely blows my mind. Has anybody else here ever done the unimaginable and violated the sanctity of a 'sealed' system? I do realize that to do that for hire these guys would have had to had recovery equipment and licenses and whatnot that it probably wouldn't have profited them to have, but couldn't they have mentioned that possibly it was something as simple as this that I could do? I can't believe the first answer is to throw it away when possibly less than fifty bucks will fix it for years to come.
Anybody got any tips about charging it? Apparently you only tap the suction line, and it only requires maybe eight ounces or so. Charge to about fifteen psi on the suction side. Is this ballpark correct? Any ideas or resources?
Thanks.
Adrian | |
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Repairing stinkin LG refrigerator
