The Failure Sequence

It’s amazing how often I run into the following scenario, but when I think about it, I would imagine that the manufacturer planned for it to play out the way it did. Anytime I see this sort of thing it makes me sad. I think a lot of people have forgotten the lesson we learned in WW2, that a great deal of our freedom depends on our nations ability to produce quality goods and products. That, so it seems to me is a thing of the past.

So anyway, I’m called out to check on a refrigerator that isn’t keeping the food cool all the time, it will do so most of the time, but sporadically the freezer will come down enough in temperature to allow things to get soft. Ice cream is normally a good indicator of whether or not your freezer is behaving properly. If ice cream is nice and hard, everything is normally good, but when Ice cream is soft and mushy, it is a tell tale sign that something is not right.

The first thing I normally do on a unit is to remove the cover so I can check the evaporator coils and immediately I notice a problem. The coils are nice and cold where they connect to the expansion device but the further you move away from the expansion devise the colder they get.

This is normally caused by a compressor starting to fail. Like a car the compressor has pistons in it which have rings. If these rings go bad, the compressor can fail to achieve the proper head pressure. In simple terms this means the compressor can no longer provide the proper amount of pressurized freon to the evaporator which causes the evaporator to only work at a fraction of it’s capacity.

This normally can be caused by age, but it can also be caused by the compressor working at a higher than normal temperature.

On this particular brand of refrigerator, Whirlpool, the back cover is an important factor in the way the compressor works. The cover makes sure that the air flows properly over the condenser coils and the compressor and removes the heat from the bottom of the unit. However on a previous service call, the owner told me another tech had damaged the back panel and so had made one out of cardboard and then taped it into place.

On further inspection, I found that the tape had given way allowing huge gaps in the back cover which then caused the compressor to work at higher than normal temperatures. After doing so for a period of time, the compressor had reached the failure point. All because the original back cover had been poorly constructed out of paper and had been replaced by one of poorer construction out of cardboard.

Back in the 90’s these back covers were made of sheet metal, needless to say they didn’t have a problem with the failure sequence I described above then. But somewhere along the line, the corporate engineers came up with the idea to save a nickel on the production and replace the sheet metal part with a paper one. The worst part is that I’m sure they were aware of the failure sequence that would set in place and just plain didn’t’ care.

The bottom line is that instead of building appliances to last, as they did in the 50’s, now they are built to fail. The lesson to be learned, don’t allow your appliance repair tech to take short cuts. They will almost always come back to bite you.

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