[tyang54]

This is going to be a long thread, so please bear with me. I appreciate the help of everyone who has helped already and everyone who is viewing this post. I am having trouble with my defrost system on the freezer. I think I have isolated the defrost system so far.

So far I have replaced the
1. Defrost Timer
2. Defrost Thermostat
3. Heater Element.
4. Ice Maker thermostat.

Following the replacement I was still frosting over and I tried to narrow it down by bypassing the defrost thermostat per the following post:

Freezer is fine, refrigerator is too warm.



As you can see from the picture this didn't work. For reference this is the second Defrost Heater. I used one of the other posts in here to check for continuity on the heating element and the meter read approx 29 Ohms resistance.

Next I decided to check to see what voltage was flowing across the heating element. In normal operating mode, I was getting approx 4.0 volts:



I then turned the defrost timer into the defrost position and checked current again (bypassing the heating element and going directly from the 2 leads going across the heating element) and only got about 2 Volts of current.



So here is where I am now stuck.

1. Why would the voltage across the heater be so low?
2. Am I measuring the correct points
3. and what matters most: How do I fixed my defrost element?

Once again, so many thanks to all of you who have helped already, and any additional thoughts are much appreciated.

[tyang54]

P.S. just another thought. It almost seems like there is a fuse that blew out and no current is now flowing to the heater. I tried a search for "fuse" on my refrigerator, but only one part came up with no picture. Are there any fuses related to the defrost heater that I can try to replace?

[tyang54]

Just FYI, I finally fixed my problem. It turned out that when i replaced the three key components in the defrost chain (timer, thermostat, heating element) I managed to replace a good part with a bad part. For some reason Appliance pros either sent me a bad or wrong defrost timer. This explained why there was no current going through even in defrost cycle.

It turns out that the defrost circuit in defrost mode runs a full 120V AC, so those pictures I took were actually EXTREMELY dangerous.

The moral of the story is, use a volt meter to test each part and only replace the part that is bad....

In my case the defrost thermostat was actually the only bad part.

Good luck on your own projects.