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Frequently Asked Questions About Domestic Refrigerator Repair:

Cuts in and out. Strike plate in between the two doors gets hot.

We have a 7-year old Kenmore side-by-side refrigerator. One day we discovered all the meat in the freezer side was starting to thaw. We cleaned out from under the refrigerator and removed a crumpled up piece that looked like insulation from underneath. After our cleaning, the refrigerator started cooling again for a short time. Now, it goes from cooling well to not cooling well and back again within a matter of hours. We have also noticed that the front of the divider wall (the 1 1/2" section visible from the front) between the freezer and refrigerator gets really hot when the unit IS NOT cooling well and the divider is normal temperature when the unit IS cooling well.

Any suggestions for a partially successful do-it-yourselfer to fix this problem? Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. Enjoyed your site! Keep up the good work!

Sounds to me like the compressor is overheating and cutting out before the cycle is complete. After you cleaned it did you put the cardboard cover over the compressor back on?

If this one has a fan that runs whenever the compressor does, check to see if it in fact does. Also, the heat on the strike plate is normal when the system isn't working. Your design has a heater under this piece that prevents the door gasket from freezing and sticking in humid conditions. Under normal operating conditions you won’t notice it’s there.

We put the cover back on now and everything seems ok. Thanks for this.

Note: So it seems at first this unit was overheating due to dust underneath. They didn’t think the cover was important so they left it off after the cleaning. Then they were at a loss to understand what was happening because even though it was for two different reasons, the symptoms present were exactly the same.