Sunday, May 20, 2007

How We Saved Over $200 Yesterday

Yesterday was our 5th wedding anniversary. Can you believe that I forgot it? But my dear husband remembered it. LOL Well that's just another reason I call him Superman.

What did we do? We stayed home and didn't spend any money. I like the not spending part. Actually, we saved over $200. For over a year now our refrigerator has been leaking water inside the top of the refrigerator section. The water was coming from the freezer area. You know - the bottom of the freezer and the top of the refrigerator. We have been keeping a tall cup under it and trying to remember to dump it out every day. Some days we remember and some days we forget. Yesterday we were just hanging around the house and chatting about what we wanted to do. Neither of us wanted to go anywhere or really get too involved in anything.

A couple of days back, Superman had given me a link to a website that has some really wonderful information about doing a little home repair on appliances. I ask him to pull up a chair beside my desk and look up the info on our refrigerator to see if maybe, just maybe we could fix it. So that is what he did. We looked online and read a few things and wa la, we discovered the problem. The defrost drain tube is/was clogged. So off to the refrigerator we headed and started taking everything out of the freezer and pulling the refrigerator out from the wall. Then we started taking the refrigerator apart to find the drain tube. Ah ha - we found it. He worked inside the freezer area and I worked behind the unit. We started pouring hot water into the freezer area and I was poking a small wire up from the bottom of the drain tube. Before we knew it the drain pipe was unclogged.

We reassembled the refrigerator, plugged it up and waited for the dripping water inside. And today we are still waiting for the dripping water. I think we can stop waiting now because we have no water dripping. The refrigerator is worked without soaking everything under where the dripping was.

That is how we spent time together on our anniversary and saved over $200. It wasn't difficult either.

***Update***

I have several request for a link to the website that Superman gave me. Here is the link that I used. Free Repair Help

Here is another great place for help with appliances Appliance Aid

4 comments:

domestika said...

I'd love to know the link to that appliance repair tips website that Superman gave you (hint, hint) - got a washing machine that's getting a bit cranky with age...

Alta said...

I completely understand about appliances and how cranky they can be. I will go back into the original post and put the link to the website. Have a wonderful day!

karisma said...

We had a similar problem with our fridge a couple of years ago and called out a repair man. $100 later he had pulled the fridge forward, attached a hose to the back a gave a good blow into the tube. It happened a few times more, so we fixed it ourselves and then it died.

We jumped straight on the phone and rang around the local stores to find the same fridge because it was half of a matching pair. Unfortunately for us the new fridge had the same bad habit, but not the same access to the back hose. We later discovered that the kids had been pushing food to back of the fridge which would end up down the little drainage hole at the back causing the blockage.

One handy tip I learned was to put a few drops of dish washing liquid in the hole occasionally as it helps to keep things moving. The other is to NEVER buy a Westinghouse product again!

Have a great day!

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