Freezer Repair in Encinitas & Rancho Santa Fe

Most chest freezers are manual defrost. The cooling tubing is wrapped around the inner liner under the walls, so cold is conducted straight through the sides with no fan inside. Cold air stays put when the lid opens, which is why chests hold temperature well during outages. The trade-off is that frost builds on the walls and has to be removed by hand. Mechanically there is little to go wrong: the compressor, its start relay and overload, a thermostat, the lid gasket, and the condenser, which on many chests is a tube loop hidden inside the outer cabinet walls rather than an exposed coil.

Upright freezers come in two styles. Manual-defrost uprights have cold shelves with refrigerant running through them. Frost-free uprights work like the freezer half of a refrigerator: an evaporator behind a back panel, a fan to circulate air, and a defrost heater, thermostat and timer or board that melt frost on a schedule. Frost-free uprights are easier to live with but have more parts that fail, and when the defrost circuit quits the evaporator chokes with ice and the cabinet slowly warms.