Tag Archives: Fridge Freezer

General

A Simple Plan?

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The theory…

Between 7:30am and 1pm today, our new fridge freezer would be delivered and installed by Indesit/Hotpoint. This in actual fact requires a bit of co-operation between the delivery guys based at Andover, and the Reading based engineer, so the works order consists of three jobs and reads as follows:

1. Call FSE (Field Service Engineer) one hour before on 7288

2. Removal of Old Appliance

3. Deliver HMB313I (our new Fridge Freezer)

The New Fridge Delivered

Seems fairly straightforward, but in practice it didn’t work out like that. Just before 9am, this is a view of our kitchen.

The delivery driver turned up, and I expressed some surprise that he was on his own. His response was that they only needed one person to do the job now thanks to hydraulic lifts and trolley. However, having brought the new fridge/freezer into the kitchen announced that it needed an engineer to remove the old one so he couldn’t do it (perhaps why his job sheet said he was supposed to have phoned 7288 before he arrived?). He said to give the call centre a call when the engineer was done and somebody would be back to collect the old appliance.

The engineer arrived at about 11:30am, totally in the dark about what he was actually here to do since he hadn’t received any calls – it seems they give the delivery driver the number to call the service engineer, but not the other way around. Of course the other reason why they arrange for both the delivery driver and the engineer to turn up together is that installing a built-in fridge freezer is a difficult job as the whole thing has to be lifted into place – since the delivery driver has hydraulic lifts and trolleys it makes life easier – unfortunately the engineer has a van with tools – no lifts or trolleys. Anyway, my thought was that since he was on his own, he could perhaps refuse to do the job. Thankfully he was really helpful, and with a bit of help from me and a bit of cardboard to slide it we got the old fridge outside, and the new one in place, and by about 1pm it was all installed and running.

The Old Fridge Left on the Kerbside

However, that just left the matter of the old fridge – sat on the kerbside at the front of our house. Giving the call centre a ring as instructed, after a lot of waiting on hold they eventually said that they will be by to collect either tomorrow or Thursday!

Bear in mind at this point that on Monday morning the Indesit/Hotpoint call centre left us a message reminding us of the appointment, and saying that they would charge us £34 if nobody was available and they were unable to deliver – since they’ve failed to complete the job properly between 7:30am and 1pm as arranged, I wonder when the cheque will be arriving for me? The call centre maintains that as we were the first delivery it would have been a bit early to call the engineer – so perhaps better scheduling is called for?

According to their corporate values they are respectful and ambitious to improve – so perhaps I’ll write them a letter detailing my experience…

General

The Fridge is Toast

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No Beer in the Beer Chiller

As Beth mentioned in her post today, our Fridge-Freezer is toast… Well the fridge part is – and you could probably make toast on the back with how much it is running – however the freezer is freezing very nicely.

The problem has been coming on for a while. Before we went on holiday, we had a nice little glacier growing down the back wall inside the fridge. Everything was nicely chilled, but it didn’t seem overly right, so after a discussion with Beth we turned down the power on the fridge, which resulted in a lot of the ice melting. This unfortunately collected in the bottom of the fridge as the drain at the back was blocked, so Beth cleaned that out by putting some warm water mixed with a little bleach down. This cleared the blockage, but unfortunately when we came back from holiday the inside was a bit cool, but not exactly cold, so we turned the fridge up.

This made it slightly cooler, but not much, so again after some discussion and a bit of research online we decided to totally defrost the freezer part of the unit. This improved the situation slightly as the fridge compartment got a bit cooler, but again not cool enough – and to keep it not cool enough the motor on the fridge was running permanently. As a result, today we called out the repair man.

He spent fifteen minutes looking at it, checking the replaceable parts and since we’d already cleaned the outflow, defrosted the freezer and all the other possibilities announced that it wasn’t viable to repair – all the other options related to either problems with the gas in the heat exchanger at the back, or other things that couldn’t be easily fixed. The only option was replacement.

Here comes the next problem, our fridge/freezer is built in, hence the manufacturers bump the price up a bit, and it’s a special order too. They had a suitable replacement that was the right dimensions and the right proportions for doors, but it has to be ordered in.

Hence why we have what is pictured above in our living room. It’s one of those party beer coolers that they usually sell for barbecues, in this case with Stella Artois branding all over it. However with the shelf removed it can take a couple of bottles of milk, a few yoghurts, some margarine and some packs of meat – all the stuff from the fridge that will go off!