Since today morning, our GE Arctica (model PSC23NGNA WW) refrigerator is not cooling in either the freezer or the refrizerator compartment - actual temperature staying above 60 degrees. Also the Express Thaw stays on, and at 3 lb setting even after I have reset it many times.

Any tips on troubleshooting the issue? Any pointers to information with diagrams/photos will be very helpful as I have never attemped to work on a fridge before.

Cheers

I will open the lower back grill behind the fridge to check, but seems that at least the compressor seems to be running. At least two other people in the neighborhood seem to have run into this problem in the past, both called GE services and mentioned that they needed the "fan motor" replaced to fix the problem.

Any help on tests/checks I could try myself to narrow down on the root cause (before buying and replacing any parts like the evap fan motor, motherboard at the back, etc)?

I saw some posts about self diagnostics, but I can't set the temperature to 5 in the refrigerator section (doesn't go below 34 degrees), so may be there is a different procedure for this fridge.

The evaporator fan doesn't seem to be working. When I set the "Turbo Cool" control in the refrigerator section, the fan started to work, but very very slowly. Reseting the "Turbo Cool" stopped the evaporator fan again.

I finally got some time and checked a few things:

1. Opened the back grill to make sure that condenser fan was working. There was a lot of lint on the condenser which I cleaned up.

2. The evaporator fan is actually working (seems that when I checked in the morning, the fridge had been shut down. So no I opened the refrigerator door for 5 minutes, and the fan started to move). The thing, however, is that it is blowing only warm air. As reported earlier, the temperatures for both compartments staying above 60 degrees, and the "express thaw" setting remains on.

3. Based on another article, checked the voltages between terminals 3 and 8 on the main motherboard connectors at J2 at theback. It read 13V. Also checked the voltage between terminas 3 and 5, which read 11.2 V.

So, still not sure what to look next. Any help would be appreciated.

Just ran the fridge for 45 minutes (had shut it down last night as it is not doing anything useful anyway) and yeah, the compressor seems to be NOT running. Cold to touch with no humming etc, and the metal tubes attached are cold too.

Does the compressor need to be replaced, or can more checks be done to isolate the problem as it might be some other related component? I am hoping that I don't have to call a pro and save some money in these times ;-)