Three days ago our freezer was inadvertently left a few inches open for a couple hours. Since then there has been a slow drip on the bottom of the opening-side of the freezer door. The door seems to seal fine and there's no damage to the gasket. We assumed there was condensation from the door being left open and that it would eventually dry up.

It is not drying up, and I've had to throw away items that have defrosted in the bottom shelf of the freezer door. Now today I'm noticing that the fridge is not as cold as it should be (it's always been on the recommended setting indicated by a dash on the dial). I've turned it up twice throughout the day and it's still not as cold as it should be (liquids aren't much colder than tap water).

The fridge is only 10 years old and I'm hoping we can fix it ourselves. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your quick response!

The fan seems to be running fine, and the door appears to seal wonderfully.

We hadn't noticed any frost, but we'd only been focusing on the top and bottom walls and the back around the fan. On closer inspection yes about a half-inch layer of frost has formed on the back wall of the bottom half of the freezer, from the middle shelf down.

I've gone ahead and cleared out the freezer and I've scraped as much frost off as I could (there was enough to 2/3's fill a small 1-lb margarine container). There's still a thin layer of frost covering the back wall. Should I leave it and hope the auto-defrost works its' magic, or should I empty everything and unplug it to manually defrost it overnight?

take the food out of freezer and remove icemaker
take back panel out.
behind the panel is the cooling coils.
if they have a light coating of frost on them then the defrost system is o.k.
if there is a lot of frost stopping up the coils then you have a defrost system problem. take a hair dryer and melt the frost and ice off of coils.
this will return the frig to normal operation for a couple of days, until frost builds back up.
this frig has an adaptive defrost timer, I am looking for the steps to put it into a manual defrost. check this for now and I will be back

I ran out of time last night so all I did was scrape as much frost off as I could and pulled out a few small ice chunks from the drain openings. I put the necessities back in the freezer and hoped for the best.

This morning the freezer was pretty much defrosted, the fridge is back to normal temperature, and a small roast I put in the freezer from the fridge last night was frozen solid. And the door no longer seems to be dripping. YAY!!!

I will keep a very close eye on it and if there's any more issues I'll follow the instructions you've given for manual defrost to see if there was an underlying problem. I'm crossing my fingers that it was a one-time issue from the door being left open in the heat and that there was no permanent damage. But thank you so much for your quick responses and great advice!!!