Refrigerators, that is. When this building was first built in the early 1970s, these rental units were equipped with Moffat stoves and refrigerators. They were relatively unsophisticated but they were very reliable, and they didn't keep you awake at nights with any weird noises. The stove in this unit is still the original from 1973, and everything still works on it, too. Its matching refrigerator died in December of 2006, after 33 years of valiant service with a variety of tenants, some of whom didn't treat it very well. Towards the end, it only had one functioning hinge on the freezer compartment door, and the regulating knob kept falling off the temperature adjusting control. But it still kept things inside at better than recommended temperatures, and it didn't wake me up in the night with any loud popping noises or sounds like some unfortunate little animal was trapped inside.
Not so its modern Moffat replacement. This thing is a whole other story - and I can confidently predict that this story will not have a happy ending. Already, its automatic defroster system has failed twice. It isn't adequate for the elimination of ice which builds up inside the heat exchanger unit which is inaccessibly mounted within the rear wall of the freezer compartment. I know this, because the first time it plugged up with ice and stopped working, the repairman came and almost destroyed the interior of the freezer trying to get that panel out of the rear wall. Then, when he finally did, we saw the problem: ice everywhere because the heat sensor wasn't functioning properly, and wasn't telling the heater to turn on long enough to melt all the ice - instead of only a little of it. So the ice slowly builds up until it completely blocks off the air flow on which all the cooling depends. That first failure was just around the one-year warranty deadline. This weekend, it happened again, right on a late Friday afternoon, when I couldn't reach anyone in the rental management office until Monday.
Luckily for me, our weather's been cold enough that things will keep nicely outside on the balcony. So I emptied the refigerator into some storage bins, set them outside on the deck, and then left the refrigerator unplugged with its two compartment doors wide open all night and part of the next morning, until I was satisfied that all the ice had melted and the water had drained away from the interior workings. There was a puddle on the floor under it, but I didn't mind that, once I discovered that my old-fashioned manual defrosting was a success.
I looked on their website for some FAQs on refrigerators, and reading it scared me, so I quit. I don't need written descriptions of the noises and problems anyway, because I've got the real thing right here to entertain me, even when I don't want it to. Let me put that another way: If my name was 'Moffat' there's no way I'd let anyone put it on a contraption like this. And this is a classic example of starting from a sensible and reliable idea (the old original) and then literally improving it to death. I'm sure glad that I don't own a nickel's worth of it - listening to it is enough for me. If this was a horse, I'd probably have to shoot it....
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