My fridge (Zanussi Z19/4D) quit working. The compressor and relay are both fine. I hotwired the relay and bypassed the thermostat. So I can force the fridge to run on demand using a switch.
Either the thermostat is broken, or some mystery component attached to the thermostat is broken. These parts are no longer sold for my model. Amazon sells “universal” thermostats cheaply, but I boycott Amazon. In fact, I try to boycott banks too so I don’t shop online generally. In the off chance that a 230v universal thermostat were sold locally, I still don’t know if it solves my problem.
So what can I do with this fridge? I could put a timer on it and set it to run 1 hr/day, or something. Is it worth it? I suppose a timer would not be accurate enough to use for food. Temps would probably be unstable. But I wonder if it’d be good for keeping wine or beer slightly chilled. Someone persnickety enough to want a wine cooler might not like the temp fluctuations a timer would bring.
Might it make sense to pull it out for parties and have it continuously run to keep drinks cold? Or would they freeze?
These use-cases don’t really interest me directly. I prefer beer nearly room temp anyway. But I’m just looking for ideas maybe to pawn the thing off onto someone else to prevent waste.
Should I trash it? I would likely harvest the working compressor in that case, but then do what with that? I could look for a trashed fridge that just needs a compressor, but I have never plumbed a compressor and messed with coolant. Can a novice handle that?
Hm, have you felt the need for a beer or wine fridge before this happened? If not, it might be less wasteful to give it away to someone who can fix it or use it for parts instead of using electricity for something you don’t really need. This isn’t supposed to be judgmental, more power to you if you do want a wine fridge!
Off topic, but how do you boycott banks?
If you’re pawning it off then just describe the current condition: that the thermostat is broken.
If you modified it then sell it as spare parts/scrap or give it away free.
If you’re doing DIY for personal use or as specifically commissioned then sure, modify how you like. If you’re always putting the same amount of stuff of the same type in the fridge then you could maybe get a timer working after lots of trial and error, assuming the fridge is in a climate controlled environment (constant temp). It will also not do any defrost cycles so frost will build up rather quickly.
Anyways, don’t burn your, or your friend’s house down.
A thermostat is such a simple device that to my sensibilities it feels like you should be able to rig something. * (i’m not a hardware guy and nothing i say should ever be taken as electrical advice)*
Or, a timer setup, janky as it would be, could suffice for some use cases maybe. (Bait cooler for fishing?)
If you can get it to below freezing, you could possibly set it up as a freezer?