Rank: Member
Groups: Registered
Joined: 6/10/2009(UTC)
Posts: 1
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My old GE TBF-16 refrigerator, which I have nursed back to health for many years now, finally has me stumped.
We were away for eight months. The auto defrost had failed, obviously some considerable time before our return, & the freezer iced up pretty badly. I tested & replaced the defrost thermostat and the defrost heater element (glass had broken, probably from the ice). The timer tested OK. Ho hum, been here before!
Plugged it back in before going to bed fully confident that everything would work. Next morning I awoke to find a thick (1/2" or more) sheet of ice at the top of the refrigerator section, and temperature in the freezer at 33 degrees or so. It wouldn’t even freeze water in the ice compartment.
Since then, I have shut it down for 36 hours to make sure all of the residual ice was gone, tested the cooling control, cleaned the condenser coils, checked for clear drain flow in both freezer & refrigerator and scratched my head for a long time.
A temperature probe inserted between the fins of the evaporator show temperatures well below zero (-15° to -30°), and also indicate that the auto-defrost is cycling correctly, i.e. the temperature increases, then drops again when the defrost timer kicks in every few hours.
One clue may be that the lights in the refrigerator are not operating. They were off when we returned. Both bulbs are good. After the 36-hour manual defrost, they both came on for a few seconds, then went off again. There are two switches (why two?) in the door – I tested both. One is good – the other was giving me some strange readings. I jumpered the iffy one to test. Even with one switch shorted and the other in the NC (button out/door open) position I get no lights.
At the moment, the air temp in the main freezer is at 31°, in the ice compartment of the freezer it is at 24°, the evaporator is at -21° and the air temp in the refrigerator is at 31°. The temperature probe was calibrated in a mix of crushed ice and water at 32° F.
I would appreciate any help. I am lacking both an exploded view and a schematic and have exhausted my knowledge and patience! It seems to me that with the evaporator getting that cold, the freezer should get colder. The only time I can detect the fan in the freezer running is during the defrost cycle – should it be on at other times? Looks like something should be shoving the cold air from where it is to where it ain't, but I'm not smart enough to figure out how that works!!:confused:
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Rank: Advanced Member
Groups: Senior Expert
Joined: 3/10/2009(UTC)
Posts: 1,363
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The fan should be off during the defrost cycle and running when the compressor is. Sounds like something with the timer could be wired wrong since the timer shuts everything off during the defrost cycle.
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