Boy! do fridges hate me! (Zanussi ZX99/5W)

Re: Boy! do fridges hate me! (Zanussi ZX99/5W)

Thought this post might help our users. I see it is 2009 when this problem started.
Well…you might like to know, since then the fridge freezer has bumbled along happily…with this fault on. Which according to much googling over the years was NTC (temp sensing thermistors) out of tolerance. Seemed to make sense.
Some 6 years later, with fault frequency increasing and the low temp warning now coming on occasionally, I thought I would tackle changing the NTCs.
You have to remove the back panel behind the freezer trays, this is where the NTCs plug in (there are two on a 4 pin connector). Then remove the screws holding the ‘roof’ of the freezer section and lower it down, this contains the conveyor heating element, which in my case had some ‘hot spot’ damage so I have replaced it.
Now the hard bit! You now have to remove the two screws at the front of the remaining evaporator tray and pull it forward and down (carefully). Easy to wreck your appliance at this stage, as you have to lower the evaporator and pull it forward to gain enough room to work on the bits you need, but not strain the connecting pipes….very difficult. Remove the insulation off the top (piece of expanded polyurethane)
You will now see the front NTC which samples the air temperature in front of the evaporator (next to the door switch), this is not to difficult the remove. However the back brown one is a bastard…this is threaded into the evaporator fins themselves on the left rear of the unit. Which means to replace it you have to tease the evaporator out of its enclosure enough to replace the sensor. [In hindsight probably easier to chop off the cable and leave it in and slide the replacement in alongside]
I could not do this without removing the white ‘back bar’ at the rear of this compartment, along with a few ‘pings’ of broken plastic from the clips as you have to do this blind.
Reassembly is also not straight forward as I had a little difficulty re-siting the expanded polyurethane which looks critical as the air ducts are above it and it’s sculptured for them. Pushing up and back together was difficult and took several attempts to re-seat the evaporator assembly and get the two screws back in. Also be careful to ensure the drain pipe at the back mates successfully and the smaller square bit is pointing down (heater wire from the conveyor element goes here). Once the evaporator enclosure is in the rest feels simple after that. I think the fact that the evaporator pipe running up the back got a little strained during the fight and was a bit springy going back did not help.
The above nightmare took me over 4 hours. Had I known I would have run for the hills or bought another fridge, it’s not for the faint hearted and I would have imagined and engineer would want a good wedge to do the job, not their favorite job even with experience I would think.
I will try and post a couple of pictures, if it fails they are here http://maxtec.dyndns.biz/fridge/31-10-15{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d}20repair/
Since the repair it has been running about 4 hours and dropped to about -7 deg. The low temp has come on a couple of times, I am hoping its because the Mrs keeps opening the door and also chucking in a chicken to freeze probably didn’t help 🙁
If this doesn’t fix it, it’s 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} for the local dump…my backs knackered now

Peter.