Condenser Cleaning: Nevermind That, What is a Condenser Anyway?

Making sure the condenser is clean is important to prolonging the life of your fridge, preserving your food, and using less electricity.

How do you take care of a fridge? There’s usually a couple things that come to mind if you really try to remember. The first is to leave a fridge unplugged for a day if it’s been laid down. The second is to not push it too close to the wall! I debunk the first one here, but the second one requires a little unpacking.

The advice about keeping your fridge a good distance from the wall is simply does not apply to most modern fridges. So if you’ve been weighed down by guilt about not giving your fridge enough breathing room, let me set your soul at ease. Unless your fridge has a lot of black tubing visibly attached to the back of it, you do not need to worry about keeping it away from the wall.*

The reason has to do with how fridges remove the heat from your food. The refrigerant absorbs the thermal energy from the food inside the fridge and freezer, but then where does it go? The refrigerant is pumped along to the condenser where it is heated by being compressed and then naturally sheds the heat into the surrounding air.

Since the condenser shedding the thermal energy from the food is essential to a fridge actually fridge-ing, it is important that it as easy as possible for the fridge to shed that heat!

Older fridges with the condenser on their back needed to be kept away from the wall so enough air could flow and they could release heat into the surrounding air. Newer fridges generally will have the condenser compacted into a small package under the fridge and depend on a fan to circulate the air through it to accomplish the same thing.

One of the trade-offs of the new placement of the condenser with a fan is that it can accumulate hair and dust quicker than the old ones did. Asking your fridge to operate while hair and dust have clogged it up is like trying to cool yourself off on a hot summer day while wearing a sweater. Sweaters and dust bunnies do a good job of keeping the warmth in, which means your fridge has to work harder to cool your food. Groceries won’t freeze as quickly and every time the door is opened it takes longer to drop the temperature back down to where it needs to be to preserve your food.

Making sure the condenser is clean is important to prolonging the life of your fridge and preserving your food. Most fridges have a kickplate right close to the floor that can be unclipped carefully to get a view of the condenser, though sometimes it requires some screws to be removed first. If you can see the condenser, you should be able to tell it is difficult to reach. Because there is pressurized refrigerant running through those lines it it important to do the cleaning gently and with the right tools.

Damage to the condenser is very time consuming and expensive to fix. Let Scott’s Appliance Services handle the job for you. We have many appliance services available to save you time and money, so check out what we have to offer here.

*There are some exceptions, so make sure you read and follow the installation instructions relevant to your particular fridge or freezer.

If you want to learn more about condenser cleaning, check out extra reading here and here.

https://www.angi.com/articles/why-clean-refrigerator-condenser-coils.htm

https://www.realtor.com/advice/home-improvement/how-to-clean-refrigerator-coils/