A galley fix...

What the smart money is thinking, on clarity in language, and in the "What's a fish worth?" department...

For the last couple of weeks, our fridge (an Alpicool CX50) has not been a happy camper. It's been running too much, pulling too many amps, as well as, to my mind, been running hotter than it should be. An obvious addition to the must sort out and fix list.

Yesterday it pretty much quit working as normal and kept kicking into its various trouble codes on the LCD screen. The problem got worse just before bedtime when it gave five furtive beeps and shut down completely. When we tried to turn it back on there was, apparently, no power to the fridge with no lights, and no LCD screen.

Bummer. So I went to bed with images of fixing the fridge today running around my head which is not an asset to a good night's rest.

This morning we plugged the fridge back in only to find we again had power but the compressor would not do its thing. It just went from trying to start and then getting one of the various problem codes. Worse yet, in my opinion, was that we had an apparent intermittent fault (the power going out) somewhere in the mix which always adds to the fun and frolic level of a job.

Researching possible fixes on the web was problematic to the the max as the Alpicool site had no real info and everyone else tended to suggest that when encountering problems with inexpensive Chinese-made fridges that the best course of action is to throw it away and buy a more expensive Chinese-made fridge to replace it.

My main problem was that the error code was for low battery voltage but that seemed wrong as our batteries have a good charge and all of the lights and LCD were bright so we obviously had enoough voltage. Everything else seemed in good shape so we seemed to have a conundrum of sorts...

I'd checked everything, well almost everything. I had not checked the internal in-line fuse because we obviously had power. Well, except for when we didn't have any power last night.

Yeah, it had to be the fuse. The fuse was the intermittent fault.

A few minutes later I had the fuse out and it most certainly had issues. It was not blown but it was not passing all the juice through to the compressor though still passing enough to make the lights and LCD screen operate, except last night when it was not working at all.

So, a new twenty-cent blade fuse later and the compressor is purring away quietly, making things cold again.

Listening to The War and Treaty

So it goes...