HELP - Damaged interior freezer panel

Refrigerator & Freezer Repair
1

First, thanks in advance to all for helping out! I am new and found this site due to my current problem.

The fridge compartment was not cooling. I was able to relatively quickly confirm that the evaporator thermostat was failed open. I began defrosting the coils with a hairdryer, but opted to let the heater finish the task after I had bypassed the faulty thermostat - the beginning of my problem. I went back after about 5 minutes to check on the defrosting progress to find that the towel I had placed under the coils earlier to help with all the water (and forgot about) was actually touching the heater and beginning to burn.

The problem: I have an area on the interior panel that suffered heat damage: melting and cracks. I removed the brittle cracks and am left with an area about a 1" x 2" where the foam is exposed.

Do I need to repair it?
How do I repair?
Is the foam flammable? I ask because it is directly across from the vertical part of the heater tube about 2" separated.

I do not know what to do. I do not want to use the new heater assembly until I am confident that I will not do more damage. I say this because the damaged area is about 3" above where the towel was and not real easy to see unless you are looking directly at that area. A part of me wonders if the defrost heater did this damage over its six years of use, and I simply did not notice it until after the towel incident, which caused me to freak out and look at everything very closely. If there is a reasonable chance that the heater did the damage, I certainly do not want to run the new one and have a fire hazard.

Sorry for the long post…

2

Cut a piece of plastic or vinyl, the appropriate size. Unplug and let the freezer warm up to room temperature. Glue the patch in place, making sure the area is first clean and dry. It should then be safe to use it as normal. There’s actually more possibility of the insulation of getting wet and reducing its insulating properties, than catching fire.

3

magician59,

Thanks for the advise. The patch is problematic due to the curved profile, and I only have enough space to get my index finger between the evaporator unit and the interior panel where the damage exists.

Since the foam backing is exposed and what is lacking is the plastic panel, could I use high temp RTV to seal the damaged area. I can get in there with a popcicle stick and/or finger to apply. It seems that this would be ideal since the high temp RTV is thermally stable, will seal the foam exposed area from water infiltrating during defrost cycle, and ensure that the heater element could not have a negative heating effect on the repaired area.

What do you/others think about this approach?

Thank You!

4

Give it a try…let us know how it works for you.

5

The high-temp RTV (red stuff) did a nice job of repairing the missing plastic liner. Cure time is stated as 24 hr’s, I waited 48 to be certain the RTV was fully cured.

The fridge is back on line. I am going to check the repaired area in a few days to see how it is doing after the fridge has ran through some of the defrost cycles.

I will report back on how the RTV is doing. It should be fine due to its thermal compatibility to low and high temps.