Lee posted this in the Samurai Appliance Repair Forums:

Good day!

Periodically, I lose control of the temperature in the fridge. The fridge is 9 years old, model number PLHS267ZA. We purchased a home 3 years ago that included this fridge.

Several months after purchasing the home, the entire fridge side froze overnight, along with its contents (the worst freezing was on the top shelf). This occurred despite the fact that temperate settings hadn’t been changed at all. Upon adjusting both the freezer and temperate dials down a bit, things got back to normal for a while.

Since then, it has frozen over every couple of months without warning. Other times, the temperature hovers over 40 degrees and we have difficulty getting the temperate below that level without things freezing on the overnight.

The settings on both the freezer and fridge thermostat range from 1 – 6 with 3.5 being marked as the factory setting. Our dials have to be set between 5 and 6 to get the temperature down to the high 30’s (barely cold enough)…in doing so, we periodically experience an entire freezing of the fridge side and the cycle repeats itself.

I checked under the fridge (where the fans and coils are) and it was extremely dusty. I did vacuum things out, but no change in temperature. I’m certainly not a handyman, but in reading other posts in this extremely valuable forum, perhaps my problem is the “Control housing & air damper control kit”? Or, maybe the thermostat? Something else?

Any expert opinions out there? Thanks a bunch in advance.

Lee

You’ve done your homework well: these units do indeed have issues with the control housing & air damper control kit, as you were suspecting from your research. Here’s the replacement assembly:

(click it to git it)

And here’s an illuminating and illustrated Scroll of Appliantology™ for this repair kata to make straight your path:

Frigidaire Refrigerator Next Generation Controls – Replacing the Control and Damper Assembly

Randy wrote:

The door dispenser will eventually have a good flow when holding the switch with a cup in the door. I have changed the filter. If used frequently within the hour, the unit dispenses as it should. If it sits for more than few hours the delay starts. You can hear the pump activate when the door witch is engaged. The Ice Maker works flawlessly and continues to output good ice and quantity. No leaks under unit. All hoses on back of unit are straight and not kinked. I verified the same of the connections where the water supply enters the unit.

Some thoughts and direction would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Randy B

First, you should know that there’s no pump– the water flows out under normal water pressure in your house. If you’re hearing a humming sound, that’s probably the coil on the water inlet solenoid valve in back.

What’s happened with your dispenser is that the water inlet valve for the dispenser has gone “lame,” as we say in the trade. Your water inlet valve is located in back of the refrigerator, behind the service panel as shown in the following two photos:

(click the pics for larger views)

The circled blue valves in the photo above are the dispenser valve. But this is all one assembly and the entire assembly is replaced as a set. Here’s the new and improved replacement water inlet valve assembly you need, comes with complete, illustrated destructions, too:

(click it to git it)

Fun Fact to Know and Tell: Whenever you change the filter, you should run a good amount of water through the system, this will hopefully push out any air which gets trapped in the system which can later cause air cushions.

Many refrigerators– most side-by-side models and some top-and-bottom models– use an extra run in the sealed system tubing that runs around the perimeter of one of the doors or in that cabinet strip (called the mullion) between the freezer and fresh food compartments. The extra tubing is called the yoder loop and it’s there to keep condensation and the resulting slimy gookus from accumulating on the cabinet and door gasket. You can see the yoder loops in both types of refrigerators in these two diagrams:

(click for larger view)

Legend has it that the yoder loop was invented by the renowned Amish refrigeration engineer, Jakob Yoder, though this is disputed by some.

The warm refrigeration tubing of the yoder loop running behind the cabinet surface keeps things warm enough that the condensation evaporates, keeping things clean and dry. The mullion should feel warm to the touch. But sometimes that cabinet area may feel unusually warm or even hot. If this happens, it’s usually an early warning that there’s a problem with the condenser area. The condenser is the hot, dusty part of the refrigerator that’s located underneath on refrigerators with a condenser fan (called forced-air condensers) or it’s in the very back on the refrigerator cabinet on units without a condenser fan (called natural convection condensers).

The condenser’s job is to get rid of all that heat that the compressor makes while it’s running and from inside the refrigerated space. If it can’t do that, then everything starts warming up. All that extra heat has to go somewhere and the yoder loop is gonna get part of it. The temperatures inside the box will start eventually start rising, too.

A common problem with forced-air condensers is that they get so clogged up with dog hair and dust bunnies that air can’t move over it and cool it off– see this page for refrigerator tuneup tips. Or the condenser fan motor may be burned out.

The most common problem with natural convection condensers is that they’re installed in a cabinet that doesn’t have enough of a gap on the sides and top of the cabinet to allow air to circulate. You may be able to get by with this with cooler ambient temperatures but in the heat of summer in an unairconditioned house, well, hope you like warm beer!