The little refrigerator that couldn't

We moved into our current house (in western TX) with the existing kitchen appliances in place, but the power had been off long enough that, before we did a walk through prior to move-in, there had been a pretty powerful stink from the rotting items in the fridge. The realtor and associates had done a very good job of cleaning it out, and had clearly used bleach, but what really made me laugh was when I opened the fridge and saw that, obviously to try and keep the inside a little fresher, they had carefully opened the tops and left two canisters of................................baking POWDER...... maybe they were just hoping I'd want to make some biscuits. (that's a mini #heydumbass inside the larger tale)

Anyway, the fridge was a Samsung with french doors and the freezer on the bottom, and it has water and ice through the door, plus an ice bucket in the freezer. Last March the lower ice maker was not working right, and the freezer stopped freezing, so I had a repair guy out who wound up replacing a part. We don't really use the ice-maker, so we hadn't noticed not having ice, but rather that there was a part hanging loose where it clearly did not belong..... It took a few weeks before we realized that the top ice maker was not making ice either.
Within this, I want you to know that EVERY SINGLE article I read about Samsung refrigerators says they are crap. Like they are worse than anything else anyone ever dared to refer to as a refrigerator unit. Like folks who own a Samsung refrigerator should just go live in a cave and give up. It makes it difficult to sift through to get to real information, but I was able to find some information about manually resetting and we were seeming to be fixed. There is a front digital display that tells the temperature in the fridge and freezer and is adjustable, and if you hold down two of the control points for 15 seconds you can reset a lot of stuff. There were also a couple of points within the ice units that were technically "reset" buttons. Eventually, we gave up on the upper ice unit and I called the tech again to see what was wrong, adding that the lower ice unit had yet to actually produce any ice, although the appearance was nice and neat and sanza any dangling parts.

We have appliance insurance, which I am happy to have, and still have not repaid to the amount of an enormous replacement of our central air years ago (thousands of dollars of replacement for a $75 service fee) and we've had a few things repaired here and there. The sticking point there is that, understandably, they would MUCH rather repair than replace, and one has to monitor the replacement so that you can "upgrade" if needed to get what one actually wanted. The fridge guy came back out, on a Friday morning, and couldn't figure out why the upper ice unit wasn't working. He told us to try a standard reset - unplug it, wait 30 minutes, plug it back in - and if it started making ice we could call him and he would cancel the part he was ordering. The space where the fridge fits is super tight, and very difficult to get it out enough to unplug it, so we shut off the breaker, waited 30 minutes, and turned it back on. The front display with the temperature came back up, and we went on about our day. Much later in the afternoon I went to get a soda from the fridge and it was NOT cold...... the temperature said it was 74 degrees! We realized that it had probably never really come back to cooling, and it was too late to get hold of the repairman, of course. We tried some of the re-set techniques online, but to no relief.

Most of the items in the fridge were already ruined, and luckily there wasn't much in the freezer but that was trashed as well. We got a bag of ice and started using the fridge as an icebox. We DO have a chest freezer - so we put some bags and bottles of water in the freezer to have replacement ice.
We forgot about the permeability of the bags of ice you buy at the store, so when next we checked, we had a big puddle of water developing. This was the first of many lessons. We also discovered the next day that freezing the water in a ziplock bag compromises the plastic, so after we had left some bags of ice in there for a while, we had another big puddle of water...... (I believe it is better to learn by doing, but a lot of things I've learned by doing again..... and again). Our ice system evolved until we were using quart bags for the initial freezing, then putting the quart bags in a gallon bag to place in the fridge. This was supplemented by every empty bottle we had, that we would fill with water and freeze, and trade out with ones that had melted. No more puddles.

During those halcyon-like days, where, to be perfectly honest, we were really just keeping the butter alive, and some drinks were cold....er...., we cooked a lot out of freezer foods we'd kind of forgotten about, so there were a lot of positives. We had to have the repairman back out to check and see if it could be fixed. For this the fridge was pulled away from the wall, and it's not worth it to push it back, so it stayed pulled out into the kitchen for the rest of the time. After he looked it over and worked out some possibilities, he left, and we unplugged the fridge, knowing the temperature inside was not as valuable as turning the fan off, which was probably leading to more heat.

*we were in the middle of summer heat, and in September I received a letter from my electricity provider congratulating us on lowering our usage even though the temperature had risen. Hilarious, as I'm pretty sure the whole issue was that I wasn't running a refrigerator for longer than a month.

It took several days before the repairman exhausted his options, and another week went by before he declared the unit officially dead. At that point he sent that report to the appliance insurance, and they required several more days to process the claim, and finally, after I had called them more than once, they were ready to talk about replacements.
I did NOT want to replace with another Samsung refrigerator, and luckily they had options that were other brands. They also had a cash settlement option, if I wanted to go to a store and pick out my own. I looked online and found a Whirlpool I really liked, just a small step up from what I had (french doors, freezer on bottom, and a DRAWER in the middle), and exactly the same size. It has only one ice machine, in the door, since we don't use much ice, and enough electronic display to be useful, so it's smart, but not SMART (city college but not ivy league). Because of the store's military discount, which was only available if I went to the store to purchase (not online), I would only need to spend about $500 of my own money to get that model. I canceled after-school plans and raced to Odessa to buy the magic fridge of my dreams. I did go to the store with the best deal on my favorite model, so imagine my dismay when I was told they could not deliver said item (and pick up my old one for disposal) until August 19th - still 2 weeks to go.....

I had several very kind offers from church folks with trucks to take in my old fridge and pick up the new one as soon as it arrived in the store, but it actually took more than a week for it to arrive! At that point, Jesse and I had to have some frank discussion about how it was NEVER going to fit out of the kitchen without taking the doors off. The prospect was daunting, and even in retrospect I feel we were correct in waiting for the professionals, or at least liability-ridden-employees of the store, to do the heavy lifting/dismantling.

The weekend before August 19th, I made sure everything was out of, and off of (magnets and notes) the fridge. The morning of delivery, before I left for school, we moved the butter and drinks to a cooler with some ice, off to the corner of the kitchen. Delivery was to be between 9 and 4, and as we live in a town more than 30 miles north of the store, I was betting on 3:30. Imagine my surprise when a call came in at 9:30! I arranged for classes and drove home (I drove that day in anticipation of leaving). I met the two earnest fellows at the house and immediately informed them they would need to come in and look, because I was sure they were going to need to take the doors off before either fridge was going anywhere. They were suitably dismayed at the prospect, but agreed after a short tour of possible routes, that it was the only way. As the fridge was already pulled out and unplugged, it seemed like they could get right to it, but everything came to a screaming halt when we all realized that the water hose (metal) was still running to the old fridge.

I had completely forgotten about the water connection. No worries, I thought, I'll just turn it off under the sink, until I opened the cupboard to find a rat's nest of cords and cables from the under sink RO unit that resembled the electrical outlet from A Christmas Story. I reached through the morass of cords and tubes, and tried to turn everything as far right as possible, all the while chanting "lefty-loosey, righty-tighty", but one of them wouldn't budge, and I had no wrench at hand. I wasn't even sure if it was running - maybe Jesse had already turned it off - so I had the guy who was holding the hose waiting start to unhook it. Sure enough, a steady stream of water came out, so I grabbed the hose and stoppered it with my thumb. I thought, "this will be fine, I'll just hold it here until they bring in the new one". That thought lasted through the first 10 minutes of the demolition style dismantling of the front of the old fridge. After switching hands once, and fingers twice, I was feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and I moved on to using my phone with my free hand to text around and see if I could figure out how to shut off the water. While various bits of advice were coming in, I was privileged to witness the delicate extraction process advocated by my erstwhile delivery professionals, involving tilting the fridge, on a hand-truck (dolly), until water came gushing out, making a large puddle on the floor. They put it back down, and I talked one of them into taking the hose back while I ran out to the garage and tried to figure out the water situation.

*Don't judge - in my defense, I'm hardly home enough to clean properly, let alone investigate the vagaries of a plumbing system that has been added and amended several times since the mid-70s. There is a maze of piping in the back of the garage that might succeed in stumping the genius mouse from Flowers for Algernon (if you don't get the reference, read the book).

Jesse had a moment to call me and knew the location of a bi-pass valve. I shut it and ran back into the house, turning on the water in the sink to let any pressure pass. When the sink stopped, I had my helper let off his thumb, but the water was STILL running in the little copper hose. I grabbed a big pickle jar off the drying rack and let it fill, thinking it would just empty the hose. After the second dump of the large pickle jar, I realized we were probably emptying the RO tank. With the helper thumb cork back on, I felt around the RO tank and discovered a mechanism that actually shut off the flow. In retrospect, that may have been all I had to do, but now I have the added benefit of knowing several more things about the inner mechanisms of the house. The last of the water ran into the pickle jar, and then the pipe could be left waving on the wall, waiting for the new fridge.

We were correct in our original assumption that either fridge would only fit if the doors were off. There was juuuuusssst enough space between the island and the wall to fit through. (There are actually 3 egress points from the kitchen, one door and two sides of an island - only one side of the island would fit) While they took the old fridge out to the truck, I quickly grabbed a mop and bucket and slopped up the giant puddle in the middle of the floor. Then they brought in the new one, slapped the doors back on, declared that they couldn't hook up the water because we needed a new connector (male/male) and he did me a favor and "gave" me a flexible hose to go from the metal pipe to the fridge attachment. I found out later that he should have left the flexible hose off the old fridge, and the connector......

By this time, they had been at it long enough that they were tremendously late for the rest of their deliveries, and so they were less than careful with assembly. They left me with what I found to be a shocking amount of assemblage left, since I had to unpack all the shelves and unwrap the drawers, etc. I have no idea if that is the norm, but the worst thing was they didn't set the doors right, so they didn't close right, and the ice machine wasn't working.

Jesse reset the doors when he got home, and he got a couplet to get the water hose hooked up. We did a reset on the front display and the ice machine started working.

The fridge is a modern marvel, and I love it. I am determined to take very good care of it, because I do NOT want to do this again. I appreciate the learn by doing model, but sometimes my eye still twitches when I think about that incident. #firstworldproblems