Refrigerator Repair · Bay Area

What breaks and what it costs

The fridge is the appliance people panic about, because the food is on the clock. Most of what we see falls into a handful of faults, and most of them are fixable in one visit.

Not cooling, freezer still cold. Usually a defrost fault or a dead evaporator fan. Frost cakes the back panel, air stops moving, and the fresh-food side warms up. Defrost heater or thermistor, or the evap fan motor. Figure $180 to $340 with the part.

Not cooling anywhere, compressor humming. That is the sealed system or the compressor, and it’s the expensive one. On a mainstream fridge that’s often past the repair line. We diagnose it for real before anyone spends money. More on that below.

No ice. Icemaker module, water inlet valve, or a frozen fill tube. On Samsung and LG this is the single most common call we get. A module and valve job runs about $220 to $380. We tell you if it’s the icemaker or something upstream before we order.

Water dispenser dead or leaking. Inlet valve solenoid, a split line behind the fridge, or a clogged filter head. The valve is the part below.

Warm on one side, fine on the other (side-by-side or French-door). Air damper motor stuck, or a control board fault. Damper is a $150 part on most units.

Every call starts with the $75 diagnostic, credited to the repair. After we find the fault you get a written repair-or-replace call and the price. No number before the visit, because a real fridge diagnosis is done with the panels off, not over the phone.

A water inlet valve, on camera

Brands we see most

Samsung. RF French-door icemakers over-freeze. It’s a known headache, and a proper fix means the module, a drain heater, and resealing, not just a new tray. See the Samsung page.

LG. Great cooling when it works. The linear-compressor era (roughly 2014 to 2017) is the one to check the serial on before you pay for anything. LG page.

Whirlpool. Adaptive-defrost board and evap fan faults on the side-by-sides. Parts are cheap and available, so these are usually worth fixing.

GE. Profile and Cafe French-doors: mother-board and dispenser faults, plus the same icemaker complaints. Solid parts pipeline.

Bosch. 800 Series: defrost drain freezes shut, ice builds behind the panel, the fan rubs. Thaw, new drain heater, done.

We also service KitchenAid, Maytag, Frigidaire, Kenmore, and Amana on the same faults.

Repair or replace

Here’s the straight math. If the fault is a fan, a valve, a board, an icemaker, or a defrost part, repair almost always wins. Those are a few hundred dollars against a thousand-plus for a new fridge, and the rest of the machine is fine.

The one that flips is a sealed-system or compressor failure on a mainstream fridge that’s already eight or ten years old. By the time you add refrigerant work and labor, you’re spending most of what a new unit costs on a unit that’s near the end anyway. On those, we’ll tell you to replace. We’d rather lose the job than sell you a repair that doesn’t make sense.

We also do sealed-system and built-in work

Yes, we do the deep end too. We’re EPA Section 608 certified, we carry gauges, a micron meter, and a recovery machine, and we do sealed-system leak repairs in-house on built-in and premium refrigeration. That’s the specialty of our sister site, adrium, where the built-in Sub-Zero and Wolf work lives. Here’s what that repair actually looks like.