It's the Two Laws of the Modern Household:
1. All plumbing will eventually leak, and
2. All appliances will eventually fail.
We had trouble this summer with our refrigerator. Similar trouble to before: the door gasket on the freezer compartment partially fell off, but it wasn't visible, because the freezer is on the bottom. Plus smaller children tend to open the freezer, and then not quite close it completely, which isn't very visible either.
So humid air got into the freezer compartment, condensed, froze, and blocked the air flow up to the refrigerator compartment. Yes, it has a fan to send the cold air up.
We didn't lose much food, because we have a chest freezer, and several coolers. We also had three bags of ice left over from the church picnic. I did find that one cooler had lost its drain plug, but I was able to dig through our hardware stash and find a rubber cap that fit. I put it into the hole from the inside, so that pressure on it would only push it in more tightly.
Our dehumidifier also was not working well...two days after the warranty expired. But apparently we won the dehumidifier self-destruct lottery, because after a couple of days it started working normally again.
I say "self-destruct" facetiously, but really I do think in some cases these electronic appliances are designed to quit working prematurely.
Better engineering also can lead to products being designed to just barely survive the warranty period, mechanically.
If I were an unscrupulous manufacturer, I would direct some of my advertising budget into making a small percentage of my products built so well that they would last for years and years. Our refrigerator has a 10-digit model number, with both digits and letters. I have to wonder what information is being encoded in it.
Friends of ours moved into a new house two years ago, and since then have had to replace four major appliances, and have had half a dozen service calls on a fifth.
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