DrewE wrote:
ScottG wrote:
A shop that rebuilds them told me it's the people who turn them off and on that have the most problems with cracked/leaking units. I think they mentioned "weekend warriors". They believe the thermal stress of heating and cooling hurts them.
Since, in normal operation, the cooling unit cycles on and off as needed to maintain temperature, I would think the thermal stresses would be greater with it left on all the time rather than turned on only when traveling. (An exception may be a few really old fridges which had fully manual controls, where the flame size was adjusted with a knob rather than turning on and off under electronic control; on those, the cooling unit would not thermally cycle if it's left on.)
There's nothing inherent in an absorption fridge that wears out; liquids don't succumb to friction the way that mechanical devices eventually do. Failure, I believe, is either due to corrosion or to operation when insufficiently close to level.
When a fridge is running, it stays relatively warm the whole time. When you shut it down it cools down far more than it does when running. When you start it back up, it has to keep the heat on solid without cycling for many hours - something it does not do when running normally. So the swing in operating temp is greater.
This was a major rebuilder that does many units every day. I have no reason to believe they would lie. Further, they are the experts on the subject and have knowledge based on experience rather than opinion. They also did experiment running units off level to see how much of an angle and how much time it took to damage them (15 minutes)
We have had this discussion many times here and the folks that full time and never shut their fridge down always seem to have the least problems.
