Garage Refrigerator Repair and Service

This time of year we get more service calls than normal on garage refrigerators. Our customers are calling because the refrigerator is cooling okay in the fresh food area but it's not cold enough in the freezer. In most cases the refrigerator is actually working fine and the problem is the extreme cold air in the garage. Refrigerators are designed to operate in average room temperatures. They work just fine with some temperature variance, but the extreme temperatures we get here in the Denver, Westminster, Thornton and Boulder Colorado areas causes problems.

Refrigerators that have mechanical cold controls that sense the temperature inside the fresh food area (opposed from having it in the freezer) are the ones that have the most problems with extreme cold. The cold control is what turns the refrigerator on and off according to the temperature settings. With mechanical controls you can tell which one is the main control, because it has the off position. The problem is that the fresh food area should run a temperature of 35-40 degrees on average. So when the ambient temperature (the temperature surrounding the refrigerator) is below freezing, the fresh food area stays satisfied and won't need to run the refrigerator. In the meantime the freezer temperature needs to be at 0-5 degrees to properly freeze the food and keep it frozen. When the refrigerator doesn't run because the fresh food temperature is good, your freezer temperature gets to warm and the food won't stay frozen.

There is also a problem with extreme heat. When the ambient temperature is too hot, the whole refrigerator, (fresh food and freezer) is affected. To understand how this is a problem you need to understand some basic refrigeration design. What we do when we cool a refrigerator is we remove heat which produces the cold. We remove the heat from the inside of the refrigerator and place it on the outside of the refrigerator. The cooler the ambient temperature, the more heat we can remove to the outside of the refrigerator. The more heat we remove to the outside, the more heat we can pick up on the inside. The more heat we pick up inside the refrigerator, the colder the air will be. So it's simple math and I will use an example with random numbers to help explain this. If the garage temperature is 100 degrees, and the refrigerator heat that we are placing to the outside of the refrigerator is 125 degrees, the difference is 25 degrees. However if the ambient temperature is 75 degrees, the difference is 50 degrees. The cooler the ambient temperature the more heat we can remove from the refrigerator and the colder the air inside the refrigerator is. Now of course this works up to a point, until we get the ambient air temperature too cold.

So what does this mean to you? If you have a refrigerator in your garage, it will encounter higher temperature swings than your refrigerator inside your home, especially with Colorado's dramatic temperature swings. Often, homeowners will put their old fridge in their garage after installing a new one in their kitchen. Just know that most of the time it will work well, but in the extreme temperature changes your garage can encounter, you may find it not cooling properly, and you may not need a Denver refrigerator repair at all!