The spare refrigerator lives in the garage because that is where the room is. It behaves impeccably from November to April, and somewhere around the middle of June the freezer stops setting properly. Nothing has been touched.
Read the rating plate
Nearly every refrigerator carries a climate class stating the ambient range it was designed to work in, and a great many stop somewhere around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. A closed garage in Palm Beach County passes that before lunchtime and stays past it until the evening.
Above the rating two things happen together. A condenser cannot discharge heat into air already at that temperature, so the compressor runs without pause and still falls behind. And the compressor itself is running in an ambient its own cooling was never designed for, which is how a machine with fourteen years in it fails at eight.
Why the freezer is what suffers
On a single-evaporator refrigerator the thermostat deciding when to run sits in the fresh food compartment. In extreme ambient it never stops asking, so the compressor never rests, which sounds as though it ought to help the freezer and does not, because the condenser is saturated and very little cold is being made for all that running.
Two things that work
- Cool the space. Even partial garage ventilation, or a small split unit, brings the ambient back inside the rating. This is the actual fix.
- Buy a garage-ready unit. They exist, they are built for precisely this, and they are the right answer when the garage cannot be cooled.
What does not work is leaving it and waiting for October. Five months a year of continuous running above rated ambient is what kills these, and when it goes it is usually the compressor.
If it has stopped rather than merely struggled, it is worth a look before you replace it. Call (561) 276-4169.
