Frigidaire Repair
From Fozzee.net
The Backstory
Our fridge is a Frigidaire PLHS37EESB7 23cuft side-by-side fridge/freezer combo. It's stainless steel finish, and has ice and water in the door. We bought it in June of 2006, when we moved into our new house.
The Problem
Sunday, April 20, 2008, the fridge just quit cooling. Eventually the freezer side started warming up as well. Becky's Dad suggested that it had to do with the defrost timer not turning on the defroster, and thus the coil freezing up. Turns out, he was right. Anyhow, he came over, and we spent the better part of the evening searching for the timer to manually advance it (he thought it was just stuck). No amount of Googling could find the location of said timer, or even a picture of it. We ended up manually defrosting it to get it up and running.
The Solution
Becky's Dad checked around a bit the next day and found out that the timer in this particular fridge is part of the "everything module" near the top of the fridge that includes the louver controls, temperature adjustment, door alarm, and of course, the defrost timer. A replacement part was about $100, and he and I installed it Monday night.
What really struck me was that the replacement module, while a drop-in, included a new harness (of a significantly different design), as well as a redesigned module. They changed the way the louver limit switches work (they now only use one) and the temperature probes are a little different style. Also, there are two additional wires connected to the module. The "old style" module is referred (in the installation sheet) to as the Genesis design, with the "new style" module referred to as the Beta design. Becky's Dad seems to think that a mid-run redesign like this indicates a problem inherent with the original setup. The guy at the parts counter seconded this opinion.
The Follow-up
In light of the wild suspicion that this is a design flaw, I have contacted Frigidaire to see if they'll reimburse me for a module that I would not have needed, had their original design been up to spec. They are taken to responding to my emails requesting more information, and then never responding again, only to ask me to start over when I send a "what is the status of this" sort of email. It remains to be seen how well this goes.
