I Learned Something From My Neighbor

You are never too old to learn things.  A couple weeks ago my next door neighbor came by to borrow my spare wand attachment to the vacuum cleaner as he had misplaced his.  He had to clean out the inside of his refrigerator because it had stopped running.  Inside?  I asked him what that meant exactly and he told me he had removed the back panel off the refrigerator to discover the inside where the compressor and fan is was completely packed in dirt.  A few days later when he returned the wand attachment he told me the refrigerator was dead and he needed to replace it.

 

There was a lot of gross stuff in there!

I sucked up all this stuff into the vacuum cannister.  Gross!

Even though I clean behind and underneath my refrigerator regularly and use a vacuum to get the cobwebs and dust bunnies I had never even contemplated unscrewing that panel and taking a look inside.  But after that conversation I sure was.  So I took it off and found it was really dirty in there.  And the little exhaust fan was pretty caked in dirt.  Enough that I'm sure it had to impact its ability to run efficiently.

 

The was water ended up pretty nasty too

That has to be better!!

My refrigerator is currently twenty three years old and I've never cleaned inside behind this panel but I did that day.  I unplugged it and used my vacuum cleaner with the wand attachment to get out most of the dirt and then a rag with my Mean Green cleaner as well as a bucket of hot soapy water to wipe down everything I could and clean out the nooks and crevices.  I also cleaned that little exhaust fan which was pretty filthy.  Then I pulled the kick panel off the front of the fridge and did my usual cleaning there too.

 

Once it was all put back together I plugged it back in and it started right back up.  Hopefully I've done enough to allow it to run more efficiently and get a few more years out of it at any rate.  So if you've never done it before, take that panel off the back and look inside.  You might need the vacuum cleaner.  And don't forget to unplug it first.