3 ms·

As I'm in the middle of replacing a one-year-old LG fridge I've been doing a bit of reading. Apparently rotary compressors like this require exceptionally prec

As I'm in the middle of replacing a one-year-old LG fridge I've been doing a bit of reading. Apparently rotary compressors like this require exceptionally precise tolerances to achieve any manner of reliability. Thirteen years doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Not great, but not bad. That 80-year-old fridge the repair shop guy is bragging about is almost certainly not an auto defrost unit. So, sure, it's probably close to a modern fridge in power consumption but the tradeoff is you'll have to scrape ice out of it periodically. https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrigerator-war https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrig... Edit: Pretty early on I got a couple wireless temperature probes and used rtl-sdr to pipe the data into a TimescaleDB instance (and slapped Grafana in front of it). I have no idea what the actual problem was because LG was keen on a refund over a repair. The symptoms were failure to cool and ice buildup on the evaporator getting into the fan and making a racket. The tech diagnosed a bad thermistor which brought the freezer temp during defrost down from 50°F to about 30–40°F. Even though the tech took a steam gun to the evaporator, it took about two weeks before enough ice built up and fell into the fan again. At this point the fridge wasn't getting below 40°F either and my landlord decided to take them up on the refund offer. Could've been a bad compressor as one of the failure modes is inability to pump refrigerant. The compressor itself sounded like a ringing bell. I stopped caring because nobody at LG cares and they are not positioned to actually service their appliances. It's likely a design flaw they either already know about or don't want to know about. Getting through to a person empowered to do anything is nearly impossible and their techs have a miserable time trying to get parts from their poorly run warehouses. I'm a bit apprehensive that other companies have joined the race to the bottom, but for now LG is solidly in never again territory for me.

bombcar 4y ago
Auto-defrost is nice for the first X years, until it starts to ... not defrost as much or as well. Sometimes the simpler ones are nicer, even if they require a bit more thought/work to use.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Most full sized residential fridges are auto defrost these days. I think it's been that way since the 80s or so. I've a 2003 build Whirlpool fridge that's been just fine. In that era the defrost logic is usually mechanical and if/when the defrost timer fails it's a $30 part that's fairly easy to replace. The LG that I just junked uses electronics to control the defrosting. That gets expensive to fix but (I think) that's also not what failed in that piece of crap.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The failures I've seen are the heating element dying (annoying in one fridge because of how it was wedged in, real pain to replace), the drain pipe clogging (this can be really annoying to clean), or the computer just giving out (usually takes the whole fridge, but I've seen it just lose the defrost). All three are more annoying to deal with than a fridge where you just know you gotta defrost it now and then (chest freezers still had that for longer, maybe still do).
userbinator 4y ago
Only one year? Was it the compressor or did something else fail first?
ipython 4y ago
LG and Samsung both have this problem. I suffered from it for years - like clockwork every three months the fan would stop spinning and the fridge would stop working until I took a hair dryer to the built up ice behind the rear panel. Good news was it encouraged us to clean out our fridge on a regular basis! I eventually fixed it by ordering a new thermistor and relocating it on the line (I read about it in a service bulletin somewhere) I also replaced the warming probe at the bottom just in case it was blocking up but I don’t think that was the root cause. Once I took those actions, the fridge worked great. Unfortunately we now no longer have a clean refrigerator, however.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LoriP 4y ago
Have to say I love this use case of TimescaleDB and Grafana – a perfect example of time series data used for something small and useful to prove a theory. In case anyone's tantalized the TimescaleDB YouTube channel has some great free how-to videos on setting up TimescaleDB and Grafana.

bombcar 4y ago

Auto-defrost is nice for the first X years, until it starts to ... not defrost as much or as well. Sometimes the simpler ones are nicer, even if they require a bit more thought/work to use.

inferiorhuman 4y ago
Most full sized residential fridges are auto defrost these days. I think it's been that way since the 80s or so. I've a 2003 build Whirlpool fridge that's been just fine. In that era the defrost logic is usually mechanical and if/when the defrost timer fails it's a $30 part that's fairly easy to replace. The LG that I just junked uses electronics to control the defrosting. That gets expensive to fix but (I think) that's also not what failed in that piece of crap.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The failures I've seen are the heating element dying (annoying in one fridge because of how it was wedged in, real pain to replace), the drain pipe clogging (this can be really annoying to clean), or the computer just giving out (usually takes the whole fridge, but I've seen it just lose the defrost). All three are more annoying to deal with than a fridge where you just know you gotta defrost it now and then (chest freezers still had that for longer, maybe still do).

userbinator 4y ago

Only one year? Was it the compressor or did something else fail first?

ipython 4y ago

LG and Samsung both have this problem. I suffered from it for years - like clockwork every three months the fan would stop spinning and the fridge would stop working until I took a hair dryer to the built up ice behind the rear panel. Good news was it encouraged us to clean out our fridge on a regular basis! I eventually fixed it by ordering a new thermistor and relocating it on the line (I read about it in a service bulletin somewhere) I also replaced the warming probe at the bottom just in case it was blocking up but I don’t think that was the root cause. Once I took those actions, the fridge worked great. Unfortunately we now no longer have a clean refrigerator, however.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

LoriP 4y ago

Have to say I love this use case of TimescaleDB and Grafana – a perfect example of time series data used for something small and useful to prove a theory. In case anyone's tantalized the TimescaleDB YouTube channel has some great free how-to videos on setting up TimescaleDB and Grafana.