Bill Roper's Journal

I should have mentioned this a while back, but you may remember the problem we were having with the handle on the drawer of our GE Cafe refrigerator where the handle would just come off in our hand and no amount of reinstalling the handle would make it stay on?

It turns out that the solution to the problem was to report it to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They have had multiple reports of this sort of problem. Not long after that, I was contacted by GE support who first sent new handles and then sent a technician to install them -- actually just the one failing handle, since the others were fine.

The handle has remained affixed to the drawer ever since.

And we are quite satisfied here.

(This comes to mind because the handle on one of the doors had become slightly loose on one side today, but I just grabbed the Allen wrench and tightened it back up...)

Overall, it might have been better to stay in bed today, but that wasn't really an option.

I am still slogging through a problem at work. I'm going to try a few more things tomorrow and I suspect that they will get me into the "fixed" zone. This is taking much longer than I had hoped.

Meanwhile, disabling the ice maker (which wasn't working, because it was frozen up) on our refrigerator did not cause the nasty noise that it was making to go away. Some more research on the Internet indicates that this problem, like the ice maker problems, is endemic on Samsung refrigerators of this design. We're relatively lucky, as it has taken nearly five years to show up on ours -- other people seem to be getting as soon as the day after the warranty expires.

The cause is supposedly that the coils near the fan have frozen up. I have watched at least one YouTube video showing how to disassemble things to get at the coils and have concluded that is not my best choice. Instead, we have turned off the refrigerator and offloaded the contents into the cold garage and assorted coolers (which have also gone into the cold garage). By morning or a bit later, everything should have thawed out and we can then plug the thing back in and let it cool down again.

According to the Internet (which may not always be accurate, but which seems to be pretty close in this case, given the number of angry consumers of this model of refrigerator), attempts to repair this condition are doomed to failure. And expensive, which makes them sort of the worst kind of waste of money.

I have officially sworn off Samsung appliances now. Remarkably, the refrigerator had a very high rating on Consumer Reports when I was buying it, which I suppose has something to do with why I no longer subscribe to Consumer Reports. I suppose the rating falls into "this is a very nice refrigerator until it stops working" category.

But we are going to need to try to nurse this refrigerator along for a while, because it turns out that refrigerators seem to be in relatively short supply right now, probably as a side effect of COVID. So we'll load it back up and see how it goes.