Fridge Freezer Woes And Saving Cash Online

There were unhappy faces around the Digi-Lifestyles office this week when our seven year old fridge freezer – keeper of the vital beer cans and supplies of cheese – went on the blink.

The Servis fridge freezer had been taking a somewhat jazz/funk approach to its duties in recent months, but at the beginning of last week it unilaterally decided to instigate Operation Meltdown.

We called up Servis for assistance and they made us feel as welcome as a bailiff at a birthday party, refusing to offer any practical solutions and unprepared to recommend a single local electrician or business. A cold shoulder to our hot fridge, if you will.

We did however glean the kind of prices we’d be looking at for a repair person to come around and take a look: a hefty £90-£100 call-out charge, wallet-draining hourly rates for the work and anything up to £100 for parts. And with only a three month guarantee on the work, we could be back to square one in twelve weeks.

Time to have a go at fixing it ourselves, we thought.

Our first round of web-sourced DIY fixes all failed miserably. These included (obviously) double checking the mains connection, fiddling about with the thermostat settings, unplugging it for five minutes and even trying a bout of quickly turning it on and off (it worked for someone apparently).

A colleague did report smelling a funny chemical whiff coming out of the freezer a day before, which suggested that maybe our our fridge had decided to offload its ozone-depleting gases without our intervention, but that seemed unlikely so we continued our own attempts at a repair.

Shake, rattle and light blown

Faced with failure at every turn and an expensive brie set to turn liquid, we tried one of the more physical remedies recommended on the web, and that was to give the fridge a good old fashioned thump (this has been known to reset a flaky thermostat).

With no sign of stemming the stream of ice cream fluid dribbling out of the freezer, we tried rocking the entire fridge back and forth but this only succeeded in breaking the last working thing left in the fridge, the internal light.

There was one last solution mentioned on several sites that seemed just a tad over the top: turn the entire fridge upside down and leave it upended for several hours. Not fancying a fridge-spawned hernia, we elected to give this one a miss, but some people swear by it.

Find out tomorrow in part two what we did next.