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