Samsung RBFERNDBC – should it be this noisy?

Hi everyone

I wonder if someone can help with this…

I bought the above fridge-freezer, and right from the off it seemed to run almost constantly.

It’s apparently meant to “cycle” through different modes to keep the energy use down, however it seems to almost exclusively just continuously hum/whir away at one level, and only very rarely quietens down or is silent.

It was bought from a clearance warehouse from a major high street department store, as it had minor cosmetic damage from a previous delivery.

So far I’ve tried adjusting the temperature settings (though it’s usually set at the manufacturers default and changing them doesn’t make any difference anyway), changing the content load to ensure there’s enough frozen items in the freezer to help keep it cold, increasing the ventilation, and ensuring the room temperature isn’t too high (it’s quite low anyway at around 17C).

Despite this, it hums/whirs away probably 23 out of every 24 hours at least. Occasionally, it’ll be silent for 10 minutes but then soon clicks back on. It does, however, maintain the correct temperature in both the fridge & freezer, as I’ve checked with a thermometer.

Samsung Customer Service advised they would charge up to £75 for a call out if the engineer felt it was operating normally and is just meant to sound like this. I don’t fancy taking that chance (sod’s law is they’ll come during the 10 minutes it’s silent and we’ll be sat waiting, hoping, it comes back on) given it only cost £225 (usually twice that) due to the cosmetic damage.

Does anyone have any thoughts/advice? Should it be running almost all the time like this?

Cheers!