Shared Knowledge
“Convert a Manual Defrost Refrigerator to Automatic”
5 September 2005
I have a mini refrigerator, somewhere around 3.3 cubic feet in size. The cooling coils are inside the refrigerator inside a compartment, which supposedly is a “freezer” compartment. Anyway, over the years, the cooling coils have become so covered with frost that I had to shut down the refrigerator, unload it and then let the frost drip down into a pan placed awkwardly inside the refrigerator.
Finally
fed up with the whole manual defrost process, I decided to buy a new mini
refrigerator with automatic defrost but when I looked around, I really could
not find a perfect replacement in size and color to the one I already had that
had any form of automatic defrost. But,
I did gleam from my research, that automatic defrost is nothing more than the
refrigerator having a build-in timer, which shuts off the refrigerator for some
period of every day so that any frost build up melts into the drip pan, which is
right underneath the cooling coils.
Timer. Go to any local hardware store and you will find there a timer you can plug into an outlet and then plug your refrigerator into it (get a timer that has the number of electrical prongs as your refrigerator, 2 or 3). Plug the timer into the wall outlet, set the current time into the timer, set the timer to turn “on” 5 or 10 minutes after you plug the refrigerator into the timer and then set the timer to turn “off” at say, 2am and then turn the refrigerator back “on” again at 4am, each and every day. Now you have an automatic defroster refrigerator! Of course, periodically, you will have to dump the water, which collects in the drip pan but other than that, the defrost is automatic!
Additional note 3 February 2006. I have been using the wall timer for several months now and it works great. For me, my refrigerator, 2 hours off per day is enough to keep cooling coils frost free. I have discovered one drawback to the automatic timer and that is if your power goes out for an extended period of time, the clock in the timer will be off and the 2 or more hour "off" period shifts from what you initially set it to some other time of day. Not a big deal but the "off" period may result in you not getting as cold a one was you would like sometimes.