Like Dokken, I'm also a stubborn cuss and my GE fridge has been doing the same things... condenser fan running slowly or not at all, compressor running 24/7 for the last week (happy power bill anyone?), temperature reads all over the map (as in fridge reads 49 degrees; unplug fridge for 1 minute and plug it back in, now display reads 37 degrees...who knows what it really is)
So because I'm also an electronic design engineer, I took the geek route which I don't expect many of you will follow, but I wrote it up here so at least some of you can appreciate occasionally not eating what the mighty corporations tell us we must...
First, the freezer drawer of this thing has always annoyed me. You open it, all the frozen air falls out on your feet. How can that be efficient?
Second, everything in the freezer gets made into a pile and you can never find anything without tossing and turning the whole freezer. Totally annoying.
Anyways... first I physically cut the old condenser fan out and replaced it with a 110 volt 4" muffin fan from a surplus store, wired directly to the compressor. That's the end of the stupid motherboard and expensive fan problem although when I tested the original fan it was ok, So it's a bad motherboard. That fixed the 24/7 compressor running. But the fridge was still on the blink temperature-wise as obviously the motherboard has some problems. So I got an Omega C9000a thermocouple-temperature controller from the eebayyy place and wired it and a solid state relay to control the compressor, totally bypassing the refrigerator's control of the compressor.
That fixed the temperature problems in the fridge, but next I found that the motorized damper that shuttles cold air to the fridge (also controlled by the motherboard) was staying shut. The result was that the I couldn't get a good balance between the freezer and the fridge, because that balance is controlled by the motherboard.
As of yesterday I'd had it. I REFUSE to pay some repair guy mega- hundred bucks to replace a board that will probably fail again, and I havn't found the exact board online. And I don't want to drive my tractor over this fridge and get a new one, although it sounds like a deliciously tempting idea....
So today I changed the whole game. I talked my wife into swappping our spare fridge in the other room for an upright freezer, and letting me modify this fridge so the freezer compartment would become a refrigerated compartment for the lettuce and veggies instead of a freezer. She said ok.
Here's what I have done:
The compressor is now controlled solely by the Omron temperature controller, and the motherboard has been unhooked from it entirely.
The condenser fan is a120 volt muffin fan that is hooked across the compressor circuit.
The internal fan (that blows cold air around) is now hooked to a little 12 volt power supply that is also hooked to the compressor. So when the Omron tells the compressor to turn on, both fans come on at the same time.
BTW the Omron uses a thermocouple to sense temperature... I drilled a little 1/8" hole thru the back of the fridge into the insides and threaded the thermocouple wire thru it, and siliconed the thermocouple to one of the mid-height shelf brackets. This way it has some thermal inertia attached to it and the act of opening the door won't make the compressor come on immediately, as it would have if the thermocouple was hanging in mid-air.
To convert the freezer to a refrigerator space, I first unplugged the damper motor and stuck it in the open position. Then I plugged two of the three holes in the freezer compartment that air comes out of when the fan's on, thus forcing most of the cold air up into the fridge section. Then I hole-sawed a 3" air-return hole thru the roof of the freezer up to underneath the left hand drawer, so now there's a good flow of cold air from the fan into the fridge, back down into the freezer compartment thru my new hole, and around again.
The last bug might have been the defroster, because it's also controlled by the nasty motheroard, so I unhooked it too, got a motorized defrost timer from the local appliance parts store, and hooked it up.
As of today, the entire machine is controlled by the Omron and the defrost timer, and due to the changes I made the freezer and fridge sections now stay at exactly the same temperature. Bad-old motherboard still runs the temperature displays and makes the fridge go beep beep when you leave the doors open, but that's about all.
So now we have a gigantic happy fridge-only, and a separate upright freezer in the other room (omygosh with SHELVES), and I serioulsly doubt I'll ever have another problem with GE's poorly designed electronics!!
Wheeeee
