by ericmark »
Tue Aug 25, 2015 12:33 pm
I had a Hoover fridge freezer and as with yours it seemed to go faulty on a regular basis so for one we took out insurance and maintenance contract which normally I don't do.
We had new electronic control panel, thermostat and bits of copper wire put down the drain hole to try and keep it running. It did in fact run for around 15 years in the end but it was a regular thing once every 1 or 2 years to call out the repair man.
Normally before calling out the repair man we would clean out and de-frost but on the last time we never got around to doing this. This time the repair man looked at the ice build up and simply said insulation failure uneconomic to repair. In hind sight likely this fault was there from new but us cleaning the unit had stopped the repairer from seeing the real problem.
I thought about the problem and only way is to compare power used with the spec for fridge/freezer. Using a power meter plug in thing over a week then times 52 and I found fridge/freezer was using 559 kWh per annum. The replacement used 229 kWh per annum. It is never worth replacing due to power used but where the figures show the power used is over what it should be it does show the insulation has failed. Clearly the repair man can't really do these tests.
Also not percentage run time. The faulty fridge/freezer was running 83% of the time, where the good one was running 56% of the time these are actual readings worked out from run amps and total power used over a week.
Clearly your fault may be completely different to mine, but I never even considered an insulation failure. Still have the old fridge/freezer it's used to brew my beer in. Never switched on use an underfloor demo heating tile inside the fridge to maintain the brew at 19 degs C using a thermostatic control and it does a really good job. Clearly the insulation is not that bad as even in heart of winter when garage is at zero degrees the 18W tile maintains the fridge at 19 degs C.
