How the Once-Over Runs
The once-over on a refrigerator starts behind it, not inside it. Wes pulls the box out, looks at the condenser coil for the felt of dust and dog hair that Mount Pleasant garages grow, listens to the fan, and clamps an ammeter on the compressor while it tries to start. Then the inside: a thermometer in each compartment, the pattern of frost on the evaporator, the damper between the two. That back-to-front order sorts a cheap airflow problem from a dear sealed-system one in about twenty minutes, and the slip is written on which it turned out to be.
What the East Cooper Side Does to a Refrigerator
Everything east of the Cooper lives in wet air, and wet air corrodes the small connections long before it touches the big parts. The plug on a condenser fan, the spade on a start relay, the terminals on a defrost heater — Wes checks those before he condemns the part behind them, because a fan that stopped at year six in a Snee Farm kitchen usually stopped at its own connector. Within sight of the Wando, Shem Creek or the harbor, salt speeds the whole thing up, and the coil itself pits; a thorough cleaning plus a fan is often the entire slip.
Garages are the second story. Mount Pleasant keeps its second refrigerator in a garage that reaches the mid-nineties by June, and an older single-thermostat box out there runs its compressor at the limit all summer and cooks its start relay by August. The slip on a garage box is written against what it is honestly worth; sometimes that is a relay plus a coil cleaning, sometimes it is a line that says stop spending.
Then the built-ins. Old Village, I’On and Daniel Island kitchens run Sub-Zero, Thermador and paneled column refrigerators, and those are opened the way a cabinetmaker would open them: fronts off gently, connectors photographed, nothing forced. A sealed-system fault in one of those earns a real number on the slip because the alternative is a remodel; the same fault in a twenty-year-old rental top-freezer earns a retire line. Wes sells no refrigerators, so the arithmetic is only arithmetic.
- Fresh food going soft while the freezer is fine
- A click from the back, then nothing
- Frost slab forming below the freezer drawer
- Doors sweating on humid afternoons
- Runs all day and never gets there
- Quit during a storm and never restarted