The Frickin' Fridge
So the fridge went on the blink again the other night -- same problem as before. The bottom part wasn't getting cold, while the freezer was working fine. The freezer has been uncharacteristically covered in a thick layer of frost lately. I checked the gasket around the freezer door to make sure that humidity and air wasn't venting in from the outside, to no avail.
The basic principle employed by this fridge seems to be convection. The freezer gets cold, and a circulating fan in its rear blows air downward through a piece of venting into the refrigerator proper. Two returns vent warmer air from the ceiling of the refrigerator area into a passage underneath the food storage area in the freezer, back to the refrigeration coils. The cycle repeats itself.
When I defrosted it before, I noticed that that area where the returns are was pretty heavily frozen in, so giving another go at defrosting seemed like a capital idea. This would take a while longer, though.
This time I noticed that the coils behind the freezer's back panel were frozen solid in a block of ice. I suspect my beloved ice maker -- still my number one best home improvement after three years in this house -- may have developed some sort of leak that might be contributing to this, as the water stays liquid until it's actually in the ice-making reservoir that's inside the freezer. There's no obvious external leak, so it's not exactly easy to check into -- especially since looking at that connection would have required me to disassemble the back of the freezer using tools I don't have. So I shut off the water to the ice-maker instead, deciding that we'll live without if we have to, at least for now.
Anyway, I waited a couple of hours for as much of that coil-ice to melt as possible (emptying out the heretofore unused drip tray several times, and making a general mess of the floor underneath the refrigerator) and things seem to be better now. I'll keep an eye on it and see if the frost reappears -- if it doesn't, it may be time to call the professionals...