Appliances At The Edge

     The refrigerator started screaming Friday.  Oh, it'd made noise before, an occasional annoyed yowl like an unhappy orc, but this was unceasing.

     There are only a few possibilities.  Compressors in a modern fridge tend to hum and chuckle, and die without a sound.  But there are fans flowing air over the coils that cool the freezer and refrigerated compartment, and often another one moving air over the hot-side coils as well.

     The inside of the main compartment and freezer weren't especially noisier than outside.  The sound was coming out the back.  I ignored it Saturday; there were other things to do and the icebox was plenty chilly, with good airflow out the cold-air vents into the compartments.

     This morning, it wasn't very cold.  I'd put a couple of bags of leftover roast pork with vegetables in the freezer and they were squishy-cold but not frozen.  The meat drawer of the fridge read 47°F -- too warm.  (And there goes a pound of applewood-smoked bacon, two weeks supply.  And most of a five-buck carton of eggs, and probably three tubs of Irish butter, dammit.) (Update: with a longer time in the fridge, my thermometer reports 37°F.  Better news for the perishables, though not great, and the freezer still doesn't freeze.  A replacement is on the way, though it would seem they're making many of them a little taller now -- and the ones I like best are a couple of inches too tall for the space.  So, freezer on top, like some kind of savage.)

     At the very bottom of my little fridge (narrow, cabinet-depth, bottom freezer, a perfect fit for my galley-style kitchen), the lowest drawer of the freezer is only half the depth of the other two, leaving an open space at the back of the device.  The compressor and hot coil live down there and I have never taken a look, other than to vacuum the vent slots at too-infrequent intervals.  Time to change that.

     With the cover off, a fat little compressor lurks at the left, dollhouse-scale tubing connecting to a ridiculously-tiny serpentine coil at the right, and at far right, a shaded-pole motor with oversized bearing spins a little nylon fan.  If not for the big bearings, it would look just like an old phonograph motor.  It comes on whenever the compressor runs, which means the compressor's running all the time.  There was surprisingly little cat hair, and vacuuming it out and cleaning the fan blades didn't help.  A sharp tap will quiet the fan motor briefly, but the Oilite-style bearings quickly return to their noisy grooves.

     My fridge, an LG LRBP 1031, is over eighteen years old and no longer made.  The fan motor, along with nearly other part, is obsolete and unavailable.  So it looks like I'm in the refrigerator-shopping business.  In the U.S., there aren't a lot of options for these British-scale* fridges, midway between a tiny dorm refrigerator adequate for a six-pack of beer and a couple of frozen dinners, and a giant deluxe French-door marvel that seats six and holds enough to feed a family of ten for a month.

     Today's brunch is canned sausage hash with some added seasoning over toasted rye breadcrumbs: always have a Plan B!

     In the meanwhile, the fridge is in the kitchen, screaming.  Sooner or later, I'm going to have to put it out of its misery.  Other than Tam's soda pop, three chocolate bars, a bag of Reese's Cups and a half-jar of peanut butter (sensing a theme...), there's nothing left in it fit to consume.  Oh, wait, I'm keeping UHT milk singles in there, too: it's shelf-stable, but it's better cold.
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* That's where I first saw them, anyway, in home-improvement shows and dramas produced in the UK.  When I moved to Roseholme Cottage, there was a huge refrigerator looming in the kitchen, making a narrow spot and blocking the entire width of the long, skinny room when the door was open.  I spent about a week thinking I'd seen something that would work better, and finally just plugged the requirements into a search engine.  Back then, there were three choices in the right size, and I had to have it drop-shipped from the East Coast.  But if I had to buy a new refrigerator, I wasn't going to settle for anything other than an exact match; I'd been coping with big, awkward fridges all my life.  About the only one I'd really liked was a round-top Philco-Ford made in the late 1940s or early '50s, in place at the transmitter site since before they went on the air, almost the same size as the flat-top LG that's hollering right now.