Whirlpool Refrigerator Repair in Dunedin: A Frozen Coil and a Dead Defrost Heater Circuit
We got a call about a Whirlpool refrigerator (model WRS315SDHZ08) at an apartment complex near Honeymoon Island in Dunedin. The fresh food section was sitting near 65°F — a serious cooling failure.
Diagnosis
Opening the freezer door didn’t show anything obviously wrong — the evaporator coil on this model isn’t visible without taking the freezer apart. We removed the back panel to get to the coil and found it completely iced over, which was blocking airflow and explained the warm temperatures in the fresh food section.
A frozen coil like this points to the defrost system, so we checked it piece by piece: the defrost heater tested fine, and the defrost sensor tested fine too. Running a forced defrost cycle through the control board’s diagnostic test is what found the real problem — the board wasn’t sending power to the heater at all. With the heater never firing, frost keeps building on the coil cycle after cycle until it chokes off airflow completely, which is exactly what had happened here.
Getting it running the same day
We didn’t have the exact control board on the truck, so a full board swap meant coming back in a couple of days. Rather than leave the client without a working fridge that long, we manually defrosted the frozen coil on the spot with a steamer, which got airflow and cooling back right away — the unit was cooling normally again that same day.
The permanent fix
A manual defrost buys time, but it doesn’t fix the underlying cause — without a working heater circuit, the coil will ice back up again. It typically takes five to seven days of the defrost system not running before the coil builds back up to the point of blocking airflow again, so we returned within that window and replaced the control board.
Result
With the new control board in place, the defrost heater fires on schedule and the coil stays clear. Both the freezer and fresh food sections are holding proper temperature again.
If your fridge is running warm or you’re seeing ice buildup on the freezer coil that keeps coming back, that’s often a defrost system issue like this one — see our refrigerator repair page for what we typically check.