You do indeed have two controls in this fridge.
One is just a damper control (it's attached to a baffle box that
regulates the amount of cold air from the freezer into the fresh food
compartment). The other is the cold control, sometimes called a
thermostat- in your fridge, it's the one on the right. (For some good
background information on understanding what these controls do
,read point 1.) What's happened is that the contacts in
the cold control have fused together keeping the compressor running all
the time and freezing everything. You need to
replace the cold control. Problem solved.
1.If you're like most of our customers, you are probably a little
confused about the temperature setting controls in your refrigerator:
what they mean, what they do, and how to set them correctly. In this
article, we'll de-mystify the refrigerator controls.
If you open the fresh food compartment of your fridge (the
non-freezer compartment), you will most likely see two different
controls. One refers to the refrigerator temperature and the other
refers to the freezer. Different manufacturers use different wording,
but the idea is the same.
The first thing you need to know in order to understand what these
controls really do is that all the cold air in the entire refrigerator
is made in the freezer compartment. A portion of that cold air is then
blown into the fresh food compartment. How much cold air gets blown in
is controlled by the "freezer" control, which is really just an air
baffle that opens or closed to let more or less air into the fresh food
compartment. The "refrigerator" control is actually a thermostat that
feels the temperature inside the fresh food compartment and turns the
compressor on and off according to the temperature that the thermostat
feels.
Let's run through an example. Suppose you decide that your ice cream
isn't hard enough. You adjust the "freezer" control to make your
freezer colder. What you're actually doing is restricting the amount of
cold air that gets blown from the freezer into the fresh food
compartment and so keeping more of the cold air in the freezer. As a
result, the freezer will get colder but also the fresh food compartment
will tend to get warmer because its cold air supply has been diminished.
The "refrigerator" control (the thermostat) will feel this increase in
temperature inside the fresh food compartment and will keep the
compressor running longer in order to maintain the temperature setting
on the "refrigerator" control. So, you can see that any change you make
to one control will affect the other.
Many people then wonder, "Well, how do I know what the correct
setting on the controls should be?" Since the temperature inside a
refrigerator will vary according to lots of external factors such as
frequency and duration of door openings, it is impossible to say where
your controls should be set all the time in order to maintain a desired
temperature in the freezer and fresh food compartments without knowing
the
actual temperature inside both compartments. For this
reason, we always recommend that you place two thermometers in your
refrigerator: one in the fresh food compartment and the other in your
freezer. The controls should then be adjusted to achieve -10 to +10?F
in the freezer and between 36 and 38?F in the fresh food compartment.
Keep in mind, too, that it takes 24 hours for any change in the controls
to work through the system and reach steady state so don't look for
instantaneous changes in temperature when you make control setting
changes. Knowing the actual temperature inside your refrigerator
compartments is also a great way to save money on your power bill since
you can adjust the controls to avoid running your compressor longer than
needed to keep your food cold.
