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[USER=”57025″]Hondaman[/USER] I still had to take the panel out and defrost with a hair dryer every month or so and did that a couple weeks ago and it’s happened again. The freezer compartment has like a thin dusting of frost in all drawers and the last time I defrosted there was an ice lake on the freezer floor.
There’s just enough air gap in the channels for the fridge to cool so I’m super cooling it to normal temperature (I have a temperature probe on the fridge now) and then will take the panel out and do your mod to extend the middle port channels down.
I can definitely live with removing the ice lake from the floor every now and then rather than messing about with manually defrosting the panel!
Hey, I found this thread when looking for how to disconnect the fan wires as I wanted to try to do something to stop my FFU3D-K from icing up.
It’s been a problem for years and tends to happen every couple of months. I added a digital temperature sensor with a wired probe, and set it with an alarm of 12 C so that I know when the issue happens and the fridge has warmed up too much (as opposed to just warming up from a cycle which could normally go up to about 8 C)
To illustrate what the fan connector looks like, I took some photos. When you undo the panel’s 6 screws you can pull it out carefully by pulling the bottom section and then the whole panel slowly out (as it is still tethered by the fan wires).
(Oh ok, I can’t post images, linked or uploaded, here due to some sort of 19.5KB group quota)
Here’s a link to all the photos I took: https://imgur.com/gallery/KfFsLOY
I disassembled the panel by taking off all the tape, peeling back the aluminium foil sheet to expose 4 more screws, and with the polystyrene separated from the plastic part you can see the guitar shaped outline sealing the channels. This is the area you can target from the front with a hair dryer without removing the panel at all. Also note that the centre of the air chamber has a hole at the bottom, so you can blow hot air up from the bottom centre (the overhanging thing at the bottom centre has a rectangular hole underneath).
The problem seems to be that the polystyrene is both slightly porous and textured, so ice crystals can form and attach to and penetrate the surface of the polystyrene and then thaw-freeze into a big solid block of ice. You’ll notice that some of the polystyrene appears bumpy. That’s due to water/ice inside each. Some I cut off where it was really damaged and some I just squeezed flat (and water seeped out). After drying it as much as I could with a hair dryer, I attached duct tape as a sort of liner and used the hair dryer to heat the tape glue up and pressed it down firmly to get better adhesion.
Then I used some motorbike visor rain wax and sprayed that onto the tape and rubbed it in. Hopefully this will make a slightly hydrophobic layer to prevent or reduce moisture and ice crystals building up.
I got my FFU3D-K in January 2015, so it’s coming up to 7 years old. Apart from the “frost-free” feature being a total lie, resulting in the air channels becoming totally blocked solid with ice, it’s a pretty decent fridge-freezer, with loads of space in the fridge, and a decent amount of space in the freezer section.
Hopefully my modification will help it carry on for a bit, and I’ll probably start researching for a better designed fridge-freezer with a 70-80cm width and up to 220cm height (to make best use of the alcove space we have for it in the kitchen).
Probably won’t be buying another Hotpoint!
