Fixin' Our Fridge

Hey what's up guys? You know we have this fridge that just stopped working around 5 years ago and we kinda just forgot about it. Then my mother just used it like a cabinet and placed some stuff in there.

Now, after all these years, I thought "OK, I'll take a look and see what's wrong".

So what's going on with the fridge?

• The compressor (motor) does not run
• Adjusting the thermostat doesn't do anything at all 
• Pressing the defrost button and turning the thermostat doesn't do anything too

Possible reasons?

• The start relay is busted
• The thermostat is busted
• The motor itself is busted

Troubleshooting:

I removed the start relay first and used my multimeter, set it to Ohms (resistance meter). With the test probes on the two terminals, I got a resistance reading of about 32.1 ohms, if it was busted then I would get an open circuit or O.L. on the meter. Ok, so the start relay is OK.

Next, I tested the motor. Testing the two winding, I got 23.4 ohms and 37.7 ohms, the motor is also OK, if it wasn't I would either get an open circuit reading or a shorted circuit (0 ohms).

Now, what's left is the thermostat. Still using the resistance meter, I tested the thermostat by placing the probes at the two terminals, this time, the meter read O.L. This tells me that the thermostat is busted, since its circuit is stuck open and no current will flow through it.

To make sure that the fridge's problem is just thermostat, I connected the start relay back to the motor and connected the wires that are supposed to be connected to the thermostat, allowing current to flow to the motor. Voila! The motor started and the fridge started to cool again.

Now I know that the thermostat is the problem, so I went out and bought a new one. This cost me around 450 PHP (around 8 USD). I connected the new thermostat, put everything back together and now the fridge is running fine again. Hooray! Saved a few bucks by doing it myself.