Enid called me at work this afternoon and told me everything in the freezer had thawed. Not only was this signs that my fridge might not be working, but I may have broken it. Last night I decided it was time to fix the ice maker and I began tinkering with the water lines to see if water was flowing to the ice maker properly. Water was making it to the water inlet valve, but not from there up to the ice maker. So there is either a problem with the water inlet valve or the signal that comes from the ice maker to the valve. Either way I end up having to buy both together to fix it, so I plunked down $103 online for the parts.

So when Enid called I assume that I have broken it, but I didn’t touch that much stuff, so I don’t know how I could have. An hour later she calls again and says the fridge is room temperature, so it appears to have gone the way of the freezer. Now I’m really confused, because I don’t understand how what I did would affect the fridge as well.

I see 3 options:

1. Call a repairman (Enid did and they can’t come out until Wednesday)
2. Wait till I get home and see if I can fix whatever I did
3. Go fridge shopping

When I got home, Enid said she had talked to her dad and he said that if the compressor stops it can be because of dirt building up on the coils. He recommended cleaning them off and see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn’t, buy a new fridge.

So I started off double checking everything that I had touched the night before and then began cleaning. Now I occasionally have taken a vacuum hose and cleaned off the coils that are reachable from the front access panel, but this time, I pulled off the back as well and found an amazing amount of dirt and dust bunnies. And these aren’t just small dust bunnies; these are bunnies from Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail. Yeah, they got fangs! I vacuumed with a small shop vac, then used the air compressor to blow dirt out from behind the fridge, then upright vacuumed the floor of all the dust that had blown out, then used the air compressor again, then shop vacced, then upright vac, the air compressor, then shop vac, then upright vac.

After all this, I put the fridge back and opened the freezer. Cool air was blowing out. I checked the fridge and it was blowing cool air as well. Later that night we checked it all again and it was working fine, so we began the process of throwing out all the spoiled food.