Bosch Refrigerator Not Cooling in Westchase: Fridge Section Iced Over From a Dead Defrost Heater

A client in Westchase called about their Bosch French door refrigerator (model B21CT80SNB). It had stopped cooling, and the whole back wall of the fresh food section was covered in ice. The freezer side was working fine.

They waited a while before calling

Before they called us, they’d tried defrosting it themselves a few times. Each time the ice came back. By the time we got there, everything behind the back panel was frozen solid, and they’d already had to throw out a fridge full of food.

On the first visit, the ice was already coming through the panel at the back of the fresh food section.

Behind it, the evaporator coil was packed in ice, and so was the fan. It was frozen in place and couldn’t turn.

We had to break a lot of it out by hand just to get in.

That’s the frustrating part of this repair. The cause was simple, but all that ice made the heater really hard to get to. Called earlier, it would have been a much easier job.

A dead defrost heater

This refrigerator has a separate evaporator coil for the fresh food section, with its own defrost heater. A few times a day that heater warms the coil and melts off the frost that builds up in normal use. This one had stopped working, so the frost just kept piling up until the coil was buried and cold air couldn’t get through.

Once we worked our way through the ice, we replaced the heater. Here’s the old one next to the new one.

We tested the new heater with a meter before closing everything up. It reads about 109. The old one read zero.

Back to normal

The refrigerator is cooling again. When we left, the display read 37°F in the fridge and 0°F in the freezer, right where they should be.

If you start seeing ice build up on the back wall of your fridge, give us a call before it takes over. Defrosting it yourself won’t fix the part that failed, and the sooner it’s handled, the less food you lose. More on our refrigerator repairs.