So last week, a technician came out and restored our suddenly dead 2-month-old fridge to working order, by diagnosing the problem as a refrigerant leak and making the necessary repairs and refills.
All was cool, literally, until less than 24 hours later when the fridge started making this noise for extended periods of time:
Sometimes it would be louder, sometimes quieter. Sometimes it would continue for a few minutes, occasionally it would rattle for more than half an hour. Never was it not infuriating.
I called Samsung back and in the course of the understanding rep listen to me wax incredulous about how we bought the appliance for its ability to keep our food cold and NOT for its potential as a random alarm clock, a new service appointment (with a different company) was scheduled for yesterday.
More than three near interminable hours after this repairman arrived the fix was in, but the first 2.5 hours involved him checking and replacing sensors and the refrigerator of course not making the noise with the tech really having no clue from my recording whether it was from something inside or outside of the compressor. Finally I got down there, pushed on the thing and voila: there was the noise, which it turned out was being caused by a copper tube from the compressor being too close to the nearby circulating fan, and when the tube would ice up enough contact with the blades and the frozen water would be made.
Part of the problem, the tech said, was that the previous repairman had overcharged the compressor with refrigerant, which in turn was causing the copper line from it to ice up when the compressor operated at its highest output. So he then reduced the amount of coolant and as an additional precaution moved the pipe away from the fan.
Now everything’s quiet and cool.
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