Bloke in Dapto rang on a Tuesday, chest freezer in the garage, half a beast in it from a bulk buy. Said it had been fine on Sunday and was now sitting at minus four. He wanted to know how long he had.
Not long, is the honest answer. A fridge that goes off is an annoyance. A freezer that goes off has a clock running on a few hundred dollars of food, and half the time people spend the first day hoping it sorts itself out.
His was the door seal. Someone had shoved a box of snags in sideways months earlier and the lid had been sitting on a millimetre of gap ever since. Cheap fix, expensive lesson.
The frost tells you most of it
Before you touch anything, open the door and look at what the ice is doing. It splits the problem into two very different jobs.
Frost everywhere is one story. A wall of ice at the back, drawers frozen into place, packets welded together. On a frost-free unit that is a defrost fault. These machines melt the frost off their evaporator coils on a cycle, and when the defrost heater, timer or thermostat gives up, the ice keeps stacking until it blocks the airflow completely. The compressor runs, the cabinet warms, and the freezer looks colder than ever while it is failing. That one is a repair.
Barely any frost, with the food going soft, is the other. Now you are looking at cold that is either not being made or not being moved. Two suspects. The condenser coils at the back or underneath fur up with dust and lint, and once they cannot shed heat the whole system slows down. Pull the unit out, switch it off, get the vacuum on those coils. It revives more freezers than people expect. The other is the evaporator fan, which pushes cold air around inside. If it has iced up or its motor has died you will notice it has gone quiet, and often the top shelf is cold while the bottom is not. That one is ours, not yours.
The door seal, which nobody checks
Take a sheet of paper, shut the door on it, try to pull it out. Do it at half a dozen points all the way round, corners included, because that is where seals give up first. If the paper slides free, warm room air is getting in continuously, which in a freezer shows up as frost forming fast and the motor never switching off.
Sometimes the gasket is deformed rather than perished, and a hair dryer on low run along the folds lets the rubber relax back into shape. Sometimes it is torn and needs replacing, which we cover in replacing a fridge or freezer door seal. Either way, ten minutes with a bit of paper beats assuming the compressor is on the way out.
Overpacked is a real fault
I say this on maybe one call in five and people never believe me. Cold air has to move. Block the vents at the back of an upright with a stack of casserole containers and the sensor sits in a cold pocket, decides everything is fine, and the far corner of the cabinet slowly climbs. Chest freezers are the opposite and like being full, because the mass of frozen food holds the temperature. Uprights need a hand's width around the vents.
While you are in there, put a thermometer in the middle of the load. Minus 18 degrees is the number, and read it off a real thermometer rather than the display, which only tells you what the machine believes.
One more on the old chest units: plenty of them do not defrost themselves at all, and they lose efficiency badly once the ice on the walls gets past about 6mm. If there is 30mm in there, the freezer is not broken, it is overdue. Empty it into eskies, switch it off and leave the lid up with towels down. Do not attack the ice with a screwdriver or a knife, because the coils run through those walls and puncturing one turns a free job into a write-off.
When the repair stops making sense
I would rather tell someone to walk away than take their money twice.
The rough rule I use: over ten years old with a fault in the sealed system, the compressor or a refrigerant leak, and replacement is the better spend. An old machine that has had one sealed-system failure usually has another waiting. Defrost heaters, thermostats, fans, seals and control boards on a decent unit are all worth doing.
Running cost comes into it too, because an old freezer humming away in a hot garage quietly costs you money every quarter, and the energy running-cost comparison for fridges and freezers is worth a look before you commit either way. If it died young, do not assume the manufacturer's warranty period is the end of it either, because consumer guarantees under Australian law can run well past it.
Getting someone out
If it is the freezer half of a combo that has quit while the fridge still runs cold, that is its own fault and we walk through it in fridge cooling but freezer not working.
Otherwise, we repair chest, upright and combo freezers on every major brand from Helensburgh through Wollongong and Kiama down to Nowra, and we do fridges at the same visit. With food on the line we get same-day where we can. The assessment fee is $125 across the Illawarra and $145 further out on the South Coast, and you get a quote before any work starts.
Book a repair or call 02 4229 3777. Tell us the brand and whether there is frost or none, because that alone tells us what to put on the van.
