A couple of weeks ago, not long after we returned from vacation, our refrigerator developed the nasty habit of leaking water on the floor every night while we were sleeping. We would walk into the kitchen each morning to find a puddle of water, the width of the refrigerator and extending out about four inches from its front. We would wipe it up - we started to keep an old towel handy for just that purpose - and wonder what the problem was. Obviously something was wrong with our fridge. We began to shop for a new one. We found several that looked pretty good.
As we were trying to decide which model to buy, my spouse dug out the service manual for our current one, wanting to double check sizes, etc. We were surprised when we realized that our current fridge is only nine years old. I've lived in this house for less than three years so I really had no idea about its age. I knew we hadn't replaced it when we had the kitchen remodeled because it was working just fine, and, since it was black, it matched our other appliances.
Anyway, when we realized it was only nine years old, we started thinking seriously about having it repaired, rather than replacing it. The refrigerator repairman came today. He discovered that we were right in our guess that the water puddle had something to do with the automatic defrosting that modern refrigerators go through every night to prevent frost build up in the freezer.
It turned out that while we were on our month long vacation, various elements inside the freezer had frozen and not thawed, I don't know why. But the result was water on the floor instead of contained and evaporated inside the fridge.
The repairman came today, spent an hour making all necessary repairs, and charged us $175.00. Soooo much cheaper than a new refrigerator.
The moral of this story is that you don't always have to buy new.
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