The saga began yesterday but it’s far from over yet. We managed to get the little fridge inside from the barn and found that we apparently hadn’t de-iced the tiny freezer inside before moving it and the fridge was not alive with mildew. Just what we wanted to deal with. So out came the bleach and we scrubbed the fridge down as best we could which seemed futile at best. It’s about 15 years old to begin with and far from looking good but it cools like a champion and that’s all that really matters right now.

So we’ve got it inside by the other fridge from IKEA/Whirlpool and have everything moved out of the IKEA fridge since it’s still over 60 degrees inside the fridge. The freezer part is working as it always has and couldn’t be better. But the fridge portion is just dead. I’m hoping maybe it’s the coolant that’s out? The compressor is running as far as I can tell (there are two, one for the fridge and one for the freezer) and the coils and everything are clean now (at least the ones on the back and I don’t see any anywhere else) so we’ll see what the verdict is tomorrow when a service person will be coming out.

Of course, finding a service person was not exactly an easy task either. We called the local electrical appliances dealer which we first went to when we were looking for a freezer trunk and he informed us that his repair guy is on vacation for “at least the next two weeks” (must be nice to have such a flexible work schedule like that!) and because it’s an IKEA fridge bebranded by Whirlpool, they couldn’t work on it anyway. Um, great.

So I tracked down the IKEA service number (not an easy task – 0848 801 100) and after dialing I was informed that I am not allowed to call that number thanks to by phone service. 1&1 strikes again. (Are you laughing now, Anna?)

Thankfully Stefan had found the service number already for Whirlpool here in Germany (for any who may need it: 01803 25 23 25) and given it to me. He apparently had trouble getting through to them but it just rang a few times for me and a very responsive woman answered the phone. I fed her all the information she needed and tomorrow we should have a service person out here sometime during the day who can hopefully fix the machine without massive headaches and bills…

If the bill should turn out to be huge more than €300-400, we will very likely just tell the guy to forget it and buy a new fridge. Of course we may still have to pay him €100 for his time but what can you do? I think if I hadn’t gotten a service person on the phone in just a few minutes, we would have ended up getting a new fridge as well because Stefan was getting pretty fed up with all the hassle. But at least now we don’t need to run out tonight to make another big purchase just yet.

Now I’m back to spraying everything outside with Round-up. Ok, not everything but all the sidewalks in front of the house and around the courtyard and even in the garden this time. It usually takes about 10 days for everything to start dying off so doing this now should give us just about enough time for everything to die off before the party.