Category around the house

Also, large appliance repair information doesn’t appear to be available online.

I *think* I need a new thermostat for my fridge, but I’m not sure.

UPDATE: Rock. It seems that repairclinic.com allows you to email them with questions about what could be wrong, and they’ll reply with info, offering to sell you the part. I sent this:

Recently my refrigerator has been seeming to run quite a bit, and during this time the temperature swings tremendously. In the freezer compartment the temperature will regularly swing from -20°F up to +40°F.

When playing with the refrigerator temperature control, the compressor doesn’t kick on or off until the knob is almost at it’s maximums. For example, I just had to turn it to off in order to turn the compressor off, and then up more than 70% through the dial’s travel before it turned on.

Could this be a bad thermostat? Or, do you think it could be something else? I’ve already ensured that the condenser and all surrounding components are free of dust, but this hasn’t remedied the problem.

Thanks for any suggestions you can give…

So, now we wait!

Hey everyone! Want to know why it’s important to clean the coils on your fridge once in a while?

Because a condenser that looks like this doesn’t do a very good job of bleeding off heat!

Fortunately mine now looks like this…

Not that things can just be good, mind you. I think my fridge needs a new thermostat, as the temp know has to be turned to about 10% short of either extreme in order to have it turn on and off. (I take this to mean the thermostat has a HUGE range of temperature fluctuation.)

I’ll give it another few days and see what happens. This would really be a nice time to have a data logger so that I could record how much the temperature really does swing.

You know, OxyClean is probably my new favorite cleaner. Not any of the special OxyClean products, but the plain old original stuff. It’s basically sodium percarbonate and nothing else. I’ve been a fan of using tri-sodium phosphate as a non-surfactant detergent, but the phosphates are really bad for ground water and lakes and stuff. Well, sodium percarbonate seems to work equally well, and is now available in retail stores. Yay!

I decided to give it a try after using a beer brewing cleaner called B-Brite. It made water feel like it had TSP in it, so I pulled the MSDS. Well, what do you know… sodium percarbonate. Now I just use that stuff instead.

Also, since I have rather oily skin, my pillow cases and such tend to get a little discolored and stuff, just from oil on my shaved head getting in there. Since sodium percarbonate is a great degreaser, throwing some in with your laundry takes care of skin oils on sheets, towels, clothing, everything. It just works well.

Hmm, you know, I’m starting to suspect that Simple Green is sodium percarbonate in water with color and scent.

Click for more…

For some reason I had the desire to rearrange my basement. I’d been thinking about it for a while, so I finally did it. For what it’s worth, I put things in roughly the positions I’d thought they would go had I finished the basement, and in doing so I’ve realized that things wouldn’t quite fit as planned…

Anyway, for those of you that have seen my basement before, you’ll see it’s quite a bit different. I also have plans to have the (everlasting) rod hole leak in the corner fixed, and as you can see here, there wouldn’t have been much room to work on the wall.

So, I did a bunch of rearranging, some cleaning and straightening, made an impromptu run of CAT5 (for the Airport Express) and set the levels on the home theater speakers. I’m going to try to remember to grab some coax from Home Depot tomorrow so I can run a CATV signal over to the TV. So, everything is in order, and I’m pretty happy with where it all is.

Oh, I do still have to run power to the arcade games. I almost forgot that, and they are useless without electricity.