Search This Blog

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Fixing Refrigerator problem

I Encountered  problem with Lg auto defrost refigerator..
It started making lot of noise and stopped defrosting automatically. lots of ice had accumulated the freezer compartment.

And i begun to solve the problem. 

I googled around and found that this problem was not uncommon and that there was poor customer care response and other blah blah.. but i wanted to fix it myself ... after some more searching i found that there is some thing called a defrost timer that switches on a warmer for few minutes every 6-8 hours to defrost or melt the ice formed . 

I checked the drain where the water from ice melted drains into a tray and is evaporated by heat from the compressor connecting ducts.. it was too dry: means that no defrosting- may be its blocked..

and i tried to open the back panel safely to explore the refrigerator but in vain....
but i was able to partially open the plastic covering the freezer compartment and saw huge amount of ice accumulating there. and i started to remove it manually as well by injecting hot water into the ducts as shown below. then the melted ice started draining thru the drain.




After this i began to solve the cause for not defrsting..
As was given in many sites i tried to locate capacitor and discharge it.but while doing that i saw the defrost timer which appeared burnt. i located the capacitor and disconnect it instead of discharging it, as i didn't have the resistor to discharge it safely..Then i took out the defrost timer and dissected it, to find the burnt coil of stepper motor driving the timer.

so need to replace the timer..

got the timer from Infantry road, Bangalore for 350 bucks and fixed it. the noise problem may be due to improper balancing and it stopped after proper alignment.


Dissected defrost timer

New defrost timer in hand. below is the dissected one.
the levers and wheels of defrost timer.



the burnt stepper motor coil of timer


this is the  new one