Here’s a shout out. Our fridge is misbehaving. It’s an Amana, with the freezer on the bottom. The freezer is working fine. The top has stopped working. Anybody got a theory on how that’s possible?

Update: I took it apart. There is a fan in the bottom freezer that circulates cold air. Included in that circulation is the run of air that chills the upper part. The fan isn’t working. I removed it and tested it. Of course it worked; but it also behaves in a manner that suggests it’s variable speed and has a thermostat. So I suspect I need to replace it. I put it all back together and it worked until we finished cleaning it; then it stopped.

Update 2: Disassembled again, the bearing in the fan motor is worn out. Once you know this thing is called an evaporator fan you can find some pretty good sites showing how the fridge is put together. More delightfully I found pdf containing a scan of the typewritten paper outlining the design. It was written in 1978 by some engineers at Amana in Iowa and the work was funded by the US government in service of making appliances more efficient. It looks to me like the design is unchanged in almost 30 years. Now to find the part, locally, on a Saturday.

Update 3: New fan: $80.  Installed, everything works – yeah. Oh boy, it’s really quiet!  20 minutes later it stops – boo.  A while later – it works – yeah?  24 hours later it all seems pretty good; and i think the random stopping is part of a defrost cycle.  Reading what I refer to as my handbook for obsessive compulsives I learn that the freezer should be around zero degree’s F, and the upper part should be around 36 degrees.  So far I’ve managed to get the top right, and the bottom’s 10 degrees too cold.  It’s now clear we should have sensed trouble when: it got noisy, the beer started getting warm, and the lettuce started freezing.