Well, it could be worse.
First a little bit of background.
November of 2014 while our house was being remodeled Laura and I decided we would not buy each other Christmas presents, but would instead buy ourselves a new refrigerator. And what a glorious refrigerator it is. A GE Cafe higher end model that may not be the most expensive refrigerator, but at a couple thousand bucks sure feels like it.
When the new refrigerator is being delivered we decided to keep the old one. It took some convincing for Laura to see the wisdom of this, but when she realized we would have multiple teenagers in the house in the near future, having a place to store just milk was enough to make the point. Our old refrigerator was moved downstairs to the garage.
Yesterday morning I wake up and find our new refrigerator not as cold as it should be. As a matter of fact it isn’t that cold at all. The freezer isn’t freezing as well.
Looking online we find there may have been a power surge and the refrigerator needs to be “reset” so I pull it out, unplug it, wait a minute, then plug it back in. While the mechanism are working, the lights are on, the display works, whatever is controlling the actual refrigeration units just isn’t doing its job.
We contact GE service who says they can have a person out the following afternoon.
That won’t be enough. I start calling other repair services, trying to get somebody out the same day. Finally I got hold of somebody who could come out that afternoon. In the meantime I went to Fred Meyer and picked up some dry ice.
When the repairman arrived he took a look at the insides of the back of the refrigerator and said it would cost $500 and the part needed to be ordered directly from GE and would take two weeks to arrive.
He left thankfully without charging us.
While waiting for the next day to arrive which would bring with it the GE repair person, it was time to take stock of the refrigerator in the garage.
I had earlier taken our cooler, the one we use for road trips, and placed the milk in that. It not only has a car adapter, but also one that will allow it to plug into a regular wall socket. There was still a lot of stuff in the fridge and freezer than would need to be taken care of, especially if it was going to be a couple of weeks before the refrigerator would be repaired.
Opening the “spare” refrigerator in the garage I was greeted with…. well, it was horrifying.
Not only had it not been plugged in for a year and a half, there was enough gunk and mold in there to…. oh, the less I describe it the better. I spent the better part of the afternoon cleaning it out and plugging it in. Thankfully it still works, but all fo the shelves also need to be washed, which took a few rounds in the dishwasher.
Then we found my old mini-fridge. I had completely forgotten about this item, something I had picked up when I was in the Army back in the late 80s. Why did I still have it? And did it still work? Turns out, yes, it does still work.
So here I sit, waiting for the GE repair person, with a new-ish refrigerator that seems to work in every way except keep things cold. It is currently 30-some hours since I first discovered our refrigerator wasn’t working properly. I have a bunch of stuff in the refrigerator/freezer in the garage. in the kitchen I have the mini-fridge, plug-in cooler and another cooler full of stuff.
Just waiting.
Oh look, here he is.
He plugged in his laptop to the fridge for diagnosis.
That was kind of cool.
An hour or so and a lot of money later our refrigerator is working.
For the amount of money it cost we could have purchased two or three used refrigerators off of Craigslist.