Service · Urgent calls
Emergency repair
A built-in that is warming with a full load in it is the one refrigeration fault that will not wait for a convenient morning. Here is what to do in the first hour, what genuinely counts as urgent, and what happens once the call is made.
- Line answered
- Around the clock, every day.
- Work carried out
- 8:00 am – 8:00 pm, seven days.
- First question
- One section warming, or both? It halves the diagnosis.
First hour
What to do before anyone arrives
Keep the doors shut. A full, closed built-in holds temperature for a surprisingly long time, and every opening costs an hour of that. If the freezer side is still hard, it is the safest place to move anything that will not survive; a cooler with ice takes the rest.
Then two checks worth doing yourself, because they occasionally end the call there and then: confirm the unit actually has power at the breaker, and confirm the base grille is not blocked and that you can feel air moving at it while the unit runs. A cabinet that has been pushed back against stored boxes, or a grille packed with dust after building work, produces exactly the symptom that brings people to this page.
Last, note whether one section is warming or both. That single observation separates a sealed-system problem from a fan, damper or defrost problem before anyone opens a toolbox.
Do not, yet
- Do not empty the cabinet and unplug it before the symptom has been described to someone
- Do not clear an alert off the display — it is the most useful thing on the unit right now
- Do not put a heater or a fan near the cabinet to help it along
- Do not defrost an iced evaporator with anything sharp or hot
Triage
What is urgent, and what can wait until the morning
Urgent means loss or damage is happening now: a whole cabinet climbing with food in it, water running out of the unit onto a wood floor, an ice machine overflowing, or a hot electrical or burning-plastic smell. That last one is not a refrigeration call until the power is off — cut it at the breaker first, and do not run the cabinet again to see whether it repeats.
Not urgent, and cheaper to book normally: a section sitting two or three degrees off, an ice maker producing slowly, an interior lamp out, a door alarm caused by a bin holding the seal open, or a wine cabinet drifting by a degree. Those are real faults and they are worth fixing, but nothing is being lost tonight.
- Whole cabinet warming
- Urgent. Doors shut, note both section temperatures, call it in.
- Water on the floor
- Urgent if it is reaching a wood floor or a ceiling below. Otherwise a drain job.
- Burning or electrical smell
- Power off at the breaker first. Do not restart the unit.
- Freezer warm, fridge fine
- Same night if the freezer is loaded, otherwise next morning.
- Ice maker stopped
- Not urgent — unless it is flooding, in which case shut the supply valve.
The call
How an urgent call is actually handled
The phone is answered around the clock; the work itself is carried out during the hours on the contact page. What that means in practice is that a call at midnight gets triaged at midnight — model number, symptom, what the display says, which section — so the visit is planned around the likely cause and the parts that go with it rather than starting from scratch in the morning.
No arrival window is promised on this page, deliberately. What is committed to is the fee: the visit and the full diagnosis are the flat service call, and it comes off the bill if you approve the repair. The price of the repair itself is given before anything is dismantled.
What gets read on arrival
- Both section temperatures against a probe, not against the display
- Condenser condition, fan behaviour and the temperature rise across the coil
- Defrost circuit end to end, and where the meltwater is going
- Door seal, hinge tension and panel alignment before anything electrical is condemned
From here
If it is one specific cabinet
- Refrigerator repair Columns and over-under built-ins: warm sections, noisy condensers, water at the toe kick.
- Freezer repair Frost patterns, drawer airflow, defrost circuits and a cabinet that will not rest.
- Ice maker repair Fill valves, frozen supply lines, stalled harvest cycles and clear-ice machines.
- Wine cooler repair Zone sensors, set-point drift, tired seals and condensers behind a toe grille.
In their words
From calls that could not wait
4.9 out of 5 across 676 reviews.
5 out of 5
Compressor was short cycling every few minutes and driving us mad in the next room. The condenser behind the plinth was choked with dust. He cleaned it out and the cycling settled within the hour.
5 out of 5
Our column sits in a tight cabinet run in a Cape up off Hillside and I fully expected the panel to get scratched. He eased the whole unit forward on sliders, found a failed door heater letting the seam sweat, changed it, and put everything back square by lunch.
5 out of 5
The bin emptied slowly and never refilled, which we blamed on the children for a fortnight. The fill valve had partly seized so the mould never took enough water. Valve replaced, line flushed, and he ran three full cycles with me watching before calling it done.
Booking
Call it in now
The line is answered around the clock. Have the model number and a description of what the cabinet is doing, and the likely causes narrow fast.
Flat $95 service call, credited against an approved repair. Details on the contact page.