Samsung Twin Cool Mystery

[capnfred 1 Posts]

Hello all…. anyone with a samsung refrigerator knows that there is a long standing problem with the evap freezing up and interfering with the fan. There have been 100’s of posts on various site regarding this.. with many solutions… Well here is my story and its been 6 months since I discovered this. My specific problem was that every week or so I had to defrost the fridge side evaporator as the ice would form in a finger that eventually would interfere with the evap fan blade and cause it to make noise at first, then it would slow the blade down. The computer senses the fan speed, and eventually it would shut the fan off. If left unattended the temperature in the fridge would rise…..soooooooo what I was going to do was use an aluminum finger attached to the defrost coil and point it at the fan. Sort of like the fix for ice blocking the drain line….because I was having to remove the evaporator cover every week I decided not to fasten it with all the screws, in fact I only put them in finger tight so I would not loose them. Now here’s the kicker, Since I put the cover on with the screws loose my fridge has been running perfectly. I have a thermometer in both the freezer and the fridge… the fridge temp (sensor is attached to the door…runs about 34-37 depending on where in the run cycle it is. During defrost it gets up to 40 for a few minutes… NO ice buildup, no fan noise, no problems…. since mid April, Now this is October and it is working fine. So for some reason there is a problem with the airflow around the evap and that was corrected by leaving the screws loose. Now for kicker….. about a week ago someone left the freezer door ajar over nite… every morning I get up and check the fridge and freezer temp since I was having the issue with the fridge side….my freezer temp was 51 degrees… OMG … it was all iced up and the fan was not running in the freezer….. so I quickly took the cover off the evap on freezer side. expecting to find the evap a block of ice… nope not bad at all… so I wiped up the water, and just snapped the evap cover back on without putting the screws back in so I could get the freezer running before the food thawed out… (by the way the evap cover snaps into place with plastic tabs…. anyway everything was working fine…. it took about an hour to get back below freezing….and about 18 hours to get back to -8 where it normally runs….. bit it did not stop at -8 but within a day it was hitting -10, then this morning it was -12 and according to recording thermometer it gets as low as -13….. that’s a hard freeze…..and again loose mounting screws.. Now I am not a refrigerator engineer, but I am an electronics engineer, and have been fixing things, designing things, and repairing things much more sophisticated than a refrigerator…. so I am going to have draw this conclusion ( at least for my refrigerator). There is some sort of a design issue with the air flow in the evaporator chamber…… by not fasten the cover tightly it seems to alleviate this problem… any comments are appreciated. I have held a commercial HVAC license… so I have a thorough understanding of the refrigeration cycle and associated components… additionally I have been working in the computer industry since the late 70’s so I have a good understanding of computers. I know it does not make sense but it seems to work,,,, my model is a RS25H511 series with twin cool…..