My Refrigerator Is Buzzing and Clicking

It's the wonderful time of the year, time to relax and time to enjoy food. I never thought that loading up the refrigerator would have caused 24 hours of stress.

It all started yesterday afternoon when the refrigerator started buzzing and clicking. It was like a click, 10 seconds of high pitch buzzing and another click, repeating every 2-3 minutes. The fan was running all the time but the compressor was not humming. Not a good sign. Meanwhile, frozen food in the freezer was thawing, water accumulating at the bottom. It's a head-scratching moment. The settings were reasonable, just normal cold and they had always been that way. After poking around for a while, I finally noticed the freezer was not tightly closed and I could see light coming out from the side seal. With a few unsuccessful tries to close it tight, I realized there must be something in the way. It turned out to be a box that fell off from the pile to the back, obstructing the drawer. After some rearrangement of all the holiday food, the freezer shut tightly but the buzzing and the clicking didn't go away. Hoping the refrigerator would recover by itself, I just let it run this way overnight.

This morning, the refrigerator didn't appear to be any better at all, still desperately trying to kick start. Last time when the same refrigerator stopped working, there was a smell of burnt plastic and it took a repairman to figure out the relay besides the compressor was burnt. Later I learned from the repairman that I could just order a new part and put it on myself. That I did and the refrigerator had been running fine till now. Determined to save a hundred bucks this time, I disconnected the refrigerator and opened up the back cover. Everything looked clean from last repair but the compressor was hot and I couldn't put my hand on it. I removed the relay, wondering if it somehow had gone bad. However, unlike last time, it smelled normal and had no rattling pieces inside. Now I got worried. Googling the web showed two possibilities, bad relay or bad compressor. If it's the latter, better to get a new refrigerator than a new compressor.

There was still hope from what I understood after reading a lot forums and articles. The compressor was too hot so it refused to start, a mechanism for self protection. The initial reason for getting hot was that it worked too hard to reach the preset temperature while the freezer was not shut tight. After the freezer was fixed, it remained hot because trying to start repeatedly drew some heavy current that kept it hot. So the hope was to just let it cool down and get out of the dead cycle. After 3 hours, the compressor felt only lukewarm. Time to plug it in, with fingers crossed. To my surprise and to my expectation, the compressor started immediately. Now the humming noise only made it a singing angel. In order not to overheat the compressor again, I turned higher the temperature settings and turned on a box fan to take away the heat more quickly. Hopefully once the holiday food cools down, things will be back to normal again.

There is definitely some design issue here. A marginal user error, that is, a small box of food blocking the freezer from shutting tight, caused the entire unit to malfunction. I would expect the compressor to work normally once the freezer was shut tight. To break out of the dead cycle of getting too hot while trying to restart, the compressor should be improved so it doesn't get hotter when restart fails due to overheating.

References:
http://www.blog.applianceoutletservice.com/2008/11/my-refrigerator-is-clicking.html
http://tech.akom.net/archives/31-Getting-your-refrigerator-to-run-without-a-start-relay-while-you-wait-for-the-part.html

Microwave Oven Competition: ItWorx vs. LAH

LAH Corp. has been making world-class microwave ovens for many years. It's probably the last thing to come across the minds of LAH management that its ovens would stop selling, until ItWorx seemingly came out from nowhere. However, LAH always has a way to turn things around and here is the story.

Linux GUI Getting Bloated

Ever since the beginning of running Linux on my home PCs more than ten years ago, I always feel that Linux GUI is a bit less responsive than Windows GUI but it's never too bad so I just go with the default installation and never need to tweak with alternatives. However, the arrival of Unity on Ubuntu becomes a game changer for me.

Unity is the default GUI since Ubuntu 11.04 but I decided to stay with 10.10 after a short moment of trying. My impression at that time was that Unity was awkward to use and everything took longer than before. With the update of 11.10, I decided to get Unity another try, only to get more disappointed.

Unity in 11.10 gets even slower than before. Admitted that my PC's hardware is not the state-of-the-art, it's at least no worse than smart phones and netbooks which are the new markets that Ubuntu tries to grab with Unity. What is a GUI good for if it slows down everything that I'm doing with all those unnecessary eye-candies? Eye-candies can never get the work done!

Since Ubuntu ditched Gnome 3 in favor of Unity, it makes me wonder how Gnome 3 deviates from Unity. It turns out they don't differ much at all in concept because they both want to be more friendly to smaller touch screens and both use large icons. Gnome 3 runs faster and smoother, which definitely gives it a leading edge against Unity. However, it's still not fast enough for me.

Fortunately, Linux is full of choices at a finer granularity than Windows. I once wiped out Windows Vista that was shipped with a laptop and reinstalled Windows XP. I don't have to do the same to get around the sluggish Unity because I can just look for another GUI that suits my need. I finally settled down with LXDE. It's much faster with more traditional desktop interface. Most importantly, it doesn't get into the way when I simply want to get things done.

There is a tendency in software industry that features trump performance. Software gets slower while hardware gets faster, which encourages software to get even slower because the gap is meant to be covered by even faster hardware. Luckily, we have choices. May the faster and the better win.

Saving WD Caviar Green Hard Drives

Lately I've been trying to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing Load_Cycle_Count of my WD Caviar Green hard drives. The count is the number of times the hard drive head parks and it's said that the design limit is 300,000 while my drives are getting 1/4 of that. The Green drive saves energy aggressively by parking its head after 8 seconds of idle time. However, the operating system (especially Linux) writes data into the drive every tens of seconds, so the drive constantly parks its head only to spin up shortly after, with annoying clicking noise all the time. This short park-spin cycle probably wastes more energy while shortening the drive's life.

It turns out that Western Digital admits the problem and provides a utility program called wdidle3.exe to change the idle time of 8 seconds up to 300 seconds. Although WD's website mentions only certain drive models can be used with the program, there has been reported successes with other models. Since this is a DOS program and I don't have any floppy drive or disks anymore, the only feasible way is to make a bootable USB key with DOS.

Create a bootable USB key

There are quite a few ways to create a bootable USB key and the easiest is with HP bootable media.exe as clearly explained by this lowFPS webpage. Following the steps, I made a 4GB USB key bootable. The drive seemed to be empty but "dir /a" command revealed hidden system files. Then I copied wdidle3.exe on to the USB key.

Boot from USB key

It shouldn't be a problem for later PCs to boot from a USB drive. I rebooted my PC and got into BIOS to change the boot order with the USB drive on top. With another reboot, the once familiar DOS prompt appeared. Then I ran "wdidle3 /s300" to change the idle time to 300 seconds (5 minutes) and verified the change with "wdidle3 /r".

Check Load_Cycle_Count

My PC runs Ubuntu and hard drive status can be checked with "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda". After two-day's usage, the Load_Cycle_Count only bumped up by 1 due to the fact that I put the PC into sleep at night.

Other sources

Synology uses WD Green for its NAS products and provides similar information.