Had a week where every single fridge I touched had a dead compressor

I pulled five dead compressors across three days in July, including one where the customer said 'it just stopped cooling' and I found the capacitor melted to the terminal block, and then the next day a guy in Oakdale told me his freezer was fine but the fridge was warm, and it was the same story on a six year old Whirlpool, so has anyone else hit a random run of the same exact failure five times in a row?

3 comments

3 Comments

julia_lee14d ago

Used to roll my eyes when guys talked about "bad batches" of parts... thought it was just an excuse to explain bad luck or something. But after seeing three identical failures in one week on fridges that were totally different ages and models, I started wondering too. Then my supplier actually confirmed there was a factory defect in certain compressor runs from that summer, so yeah, you really can get that wave effect. Kinda changed my whole view on the "coincidence" thing, not gonna lie.

lindab4915d ago

That July run sounds like it was Plagued. I once had three straight calls where the evaporator fan was dead, and on the fourth one I got all excited like 'finally something different' and it was a dead fan on a different brand. At that point I started wondering if I was accidentally cursing refrigerators just by walking into the kitchen. My wife made me switch up my morning routine, like maybe I was waking up on the wrong side of the bed and sending bad vibes into the appliance.

margaret_kelly5515d ago

Oh man @lindab49, that morning routine thing might have some truth to it though! The whole "wrong side of the bed" thing is real, I swear. Actually, it might not be the bed so much as the fridge compressor cycles. See, when evaporator fans die in waves like that, it's usually because of a bad batch of parts from the same factory. I heard a tech once say that manufacturing runs can have hidden defects that show up around the same time. So you weren't cursing them, you were just unlucky enough to be the guy who gets all the fridges from the bad shipment! Your wife was sweet to try and fix the vibes though, that's pretty funny.