When it rains…

Lately, our area has been hit with a huge amount of rain, along with other natural disasters. We’ve had an earthquake, a hurricane and remnants of a tropical storm. Last week it rained…a lot, and the ground was so saturated that the water had no where to go, causing major road closures and a fair amount of damage. Our friends, who live about two miles from us, saw part of their road literally wash away, creating a gap about 20 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. It was an incredible sight, that I failed to take a photo of. Sorry for that.

On thursday night, MC and I left work around 5:30pm, and finally made it home a little after 9:30pm. This drive, about 20 miles, normally takes us 45 minutes, but thanks to so many road closures by our house, we had to make several detours. Once we finally made it home, I opened the fridge to grab a beverage and wind down, only to hear an odd sound, a clicking noise eminating from the fridge. Along with that noise, was an odd smell, almost like burning. I also noticed that the fan to the fridge would not kick on. Our long commute home was about to be accompanied by appliance failure. As I opened our freezer door, it was evident, everything was thawing and our fridge wasn’t working…at all.

As you can see, our fridge is nothing fancy, and in fact, is relatively new, so this latest blow (after our plumbing fiasco) was just another “when it rains, it pours” scenario. I should also mention that we had just finished a massive “freezer” shopping trip at the grocery store, so watching everything begin to thaw was rather aggravating. We packed up our cooler with everything we could, a few freeze packs, and drove over to MC’s folks place, since they live nearby and had plenty of spare freezer space. We went to bed contemplating what to do next, buy a new fridge and be out a lot of money we hadn’t planned, or call our home warranty company and see if they can get it fixed. I know, it seems like a no brainer, call the warranty company and get it fixed, but we’ve dealt with them on many occasions and it hasn’t always turned out well.

Sidebar. The reason we decided to redo our entire half bathroom was because the toilet was leaking, and we had called our warranty company to fix it. The plumber they sent out came over three times, tightened some bolts each time, and the leak continued. Fed up with paying the deducible again and again, we opted to just take care of it ourselves, hence the renovation. Also, I had to figure out and fix the oven door myself because it wasn’t covered, even though that the heat resistant glass was falling out. The reason, the oven still baked, therefore it worked. Even though it was extremely dangerous, it performed it’s basic function.

Back to our fridge. We did decide to call the warranty company, and they sent someone out the next morning. We really had no idea what was wrong with it, just that it wasn’t doing the one function of a fridge, keeping things cool. Turns out, the culprit was an auto defrost timer in our fridge, that has a 30 minute cycle so it doesn’t freeze up. The timer was stuck, and constantly defrosting, thawing everything we had, and wouldn’t run the cooling fan or compressor until the defrost cycle stopped. The smell was our fridge just defrosting constantly (it smelled like freezer burn) so a new switch was installed, and we haven’t had the problem again.

In the end, the warranty company came through, but every time something breaks (which has been more frequently lately), we’re always on the fence if we should call them or not. They don’t have the best contractors associated with them, and no one really seems to care all that much about helping, they just want to make it as basic and functional as possible.

*I would like to note that the weather caused a mass amount of damage to homes, and we were lucky to escape that. I am not at all comparing our situation to those that endured massive damage, I am only making a relative story that when one thing goes wrong, it seems that more things follow.