Day 361- Is Your Refrigerator Running?

I wake up this morning a little after 6. The sun is coming up and I’m not quite fully awake when I hear the all too familiar alarm on our refrigerator. It’s a very quiet intermittent beep. There are two reasons it alarms. Either the door is open or the temperature is higher than the set point.

I grumpily get out of bed and mumble something about Tywana or Kayla leaving the door open again. This is a common occurrence and a few times it has been left ajar overnight. I stumble downstairs expecting to find the left door ajar. It’s not. I push it and it’s already closed. The alarm continues to sound, so I open the refrigerator and see it’s the temperature alarm. The temperature reading is 46 degrees. It should be 38. As I’m looking at it, it jumps to 52 degrees. There is no way having the door open for a few seconds should allow the temperature to rise 6 degrees. I’m confused. I check the setpoint. It’s still 38 degrees. I feel a can of pop in the fridge. It feels cold.

I figure something is broken. I turn off the temperature alarm so it won’t annoy me. The engineer in me kicks in. I troubleshoot the problem. I’m going through. “Who do I call? How much is this going to cost? What could be wrong?”. The freezer is still cold so it’s probably not the compressor. No way the temperature actually went from 46 to 52 degrees. So it must be the thermostat. But if it’s the thermostat and it thinks it’s 46 degrees, why doesn’t it just cool it to 38? I can’t figure it out.

I like in bed for another hour or so then get up to take my walk. I’ll call the repair shop after I get home. Just for kicks though I open the door to see what the temperature is reading. It’s exactly 38 degrees. No wavering. Just running like it should. I turn the temperature alarm back on so it will alert me if the temperature rises. 12 hours later. No alarms. It seems to have fixed itself.