Category: Life with Pratts

No, I didn’t wait in the dark and cold, hoping to grab a door-buster special at 4 AM. Earlier this week we bought a new refrigerator. My defrost fix on our Frigidaire was temporary, because the coils iced over again. I’m a terrible fatalist about some things, and having never had success with refrigerator repairs in the past I didn’t want to bother seeing if it could be fixed. We’ve never liked the thing anyway, so I told Carol let’s just buy a new one. Delivery of a new Kenmore side-by-side, model 5102, is scheduled for today, and from a check of appliances at Best Buy it appears the manufacturer of this particular Kenmore is GE.

Today the same refrigerator is on sale for $60 less than what I paid. So, hoping there might be a price matching deal, and wanting to avoid driving to the mall on Black Friday, I pulled out my receipt and called the phone number for the store at the mall. Doing that put me through the usual voice system nightmare that we all know well. Several attempts to reach the appliance department ended up dumping me to a national call center, where I was asked if I had the store’s phone number. “Uh, yes, I did, and that was how I got you.” They were unable to give me a direct-dial number of the appliance department at the local store.

I went online and dug up a local, direct number for automotive. Close enough, because it worked. I said I was trying to reach the appliance department, and the gruff sounding but nice guy who answered the phoned transferred me.

Once I was speaking to a person on the floor where had I spent an hour or two a few days ago, she really was helpful. She looked up my order and said, “Yeah, it’s sixty dollars less, but we won’t include free delivery at that price, and that would be seventy dollars, so you’re doing better with the deal you have.” I went online to check, which was what I should have done to begin with, and, sure enough, delivery “starts at $70,” plus another ten bucks for hauling away the old one.

With all of the lip service that large retail corporations give to customer satisfaction, it’s hilarious and frustrating how often they intentionally fail to deliver it. Voice systems that dump customers to national call centers just get in the way. The good news is that when I reached the appliance department I was given a straight, quick explanation. So, once you get past the corporate nonsense, old-fashioned customer service still exists at Sears.

Follow-up: The old refrigerator, when it was working, held the freezer at -10F, the optimal temperature. When it broke the best it could do was +10F. The new refrigerator has been running for ten hours, and so far the best it can do in the freezer compartment is… +10F.

Follow follow-up: Whatta difference a day makes. I’ve never seen a refrigerator take so long to find its temperatures, but by setting the fridge one level warmer it’s now below 35F and the freezer is at -10F.

Here’s the exciting follow-up to last night’s suspenseful post. I managed to get both the refrigerator and garage door working.

• Refrigerator: With the fridge turned off and emptied out I could see through a hole in a sheet metal panel at the back of the freezer section that the coils were iced over. (The dehumidifier in the basement will ice up like this if I leave it set too high in the fall.) With a small hex wrench and some effort, I pulled off the panel, then I used Carol’s hair dryer to melt the ice enough that I could pull it off in big chunks. When the coils were clear I put the panel back on, Carol got the food back in, and a couple of hours after turning it on the fridge compartment was below 40 and the freezer was below zero, so I know the compressor is still working. My guess is the defrost cycle got messed up because of the days-long power failure, but I really don’t know.

• Garage door: The motor was clicking and humming, but it wasn’t moving the belt. The door has been hitting the floor too hard since the torsion springs were replaced last month by Precision Garage Door (the outfit that I will never use again). I suspected this was knocking the switch out of kilter that turns off the motor. I pulled the release cord to disconnect the motor from the door bracket, then I slid the switch back and forth and opened and closed the door manually a few times. I got up on the stepladder, opened the back of the motor, and adjusted the closing force for a lighter landing. After the release cord was reset I hit the switch and the door opened. When closing, the door now touches the floor gently.

When I got home from work I was greeted with two emergencies: the garage door opener — again! — and the refrigerator. The garage door motor just clicks and hums and the refrigerator sounds like it’s working but it isn’t cooling. There’s nothing I can do about the door, but I had Carol empty the fridge and I discovered that the coils are coated in ice.