Comment on hot-wired a fridge mystery component. Nothing happened. What is it?
diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days agoI posted a pic in a reply but the component is hidden behind the metal plate.
I wonder if it is a thermal fuse, then I don’t know what would warm the plate. It has a coil of refrigerant which you can see in the pic… just one loop of coolant. I’m baffled that it’s enough to cool the whole fridge compartment. As far as getting warm, I wonder if the compressor could somehow run in reverse and push hot refrigerant through the coil to defrost things?
bitfucker@programming.dev 4 days ago
I’ve seen the pic. So the plate is not the component? I thought the whole plate was the component. In that case, if it is a small metal plate like any of this, then it most likely is a thermal cutoff.
Thermal switch variation
It’s not running the compressor in reverse necessarily. It just used to sense when the temperature of some point has reached some threshold. Remember, a high temperature on the cold side could also be used to trigger the compressor to cool down the fridge.
diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The mystery component is hiding behind the plate. If I follow the two white wires from the thermostat, they go behind the plate and make a loop that attaches to the backside of the plate.
I mean, you could also say the plate is a mystery to me as well. I’m quite baffled by this fridge because it’s nothing like the videos I’ve seen on fridges. The plate must be cooling the fridge compartment because there is no vent coming from the freezer.
bitfucker@programming.dev 4 days ago
Yeah, that’s a broken heater. A broken heater sign is usually high resistance or good ol disconnect. It being in parallel further reinforces that. This is a common schematic for domestic refrigerators.
Domestic refrigerator schematic
diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
For the moment I just disconnected the heating element and wired in a t-stat from a mini fridge. The heatin element could very well have been broken as long as I owned the fridge (it was given to me as a quite old 2nd hand fridge).
I guess I will keep my eye out for similar normal sized fridges that are trashed. Maybe I can harvest a heating element and combined t-stat like mine to recover the auto-defrosting function.