Testing and Replacing a GE Defrost Sensor - WR55x10025

hi I'm Andy thanks for watching today we're going to talk about how to test a defrost sensor for your GE side-by-side now these defrost sensors they're actually used in various forms throughout your refrigerator it's the same type sensor that's going to sense how cold your refrigerator section is your freezer temperature and also your defrost temperature they send a response back to the control board I'm going to tell you how to test these from the control board so you actually don't have to cut them out of your refrigerator to do the test let's get started what you'll need to perform the test is a multimeter and a quarter-inch nut driver to remove this panel to remove the panel remove the two top bolts and the one bottom bolt the common symptoms that you'll find with failed sensors is it's either too warm or too cold and the refrigerator or the freezer section or in the defrost sensor scenario your fridge may not be going through a full defrost cycle so either inconsistent defrost cycles or it's just not defrosting at all let's take a look so before you get started make sure that your refrigerator is unplugged from the wall we're performing these tests on our refrigerator with no power so the plug that we're going to be dealing with is j1 and if you look on the green section of the board you can actually see j1 listed just to the left of the plug that you're working on so how this test is done take your black lead and count from the left one two three four five should have a blue wire with a white stripe through it and that's where your black lead will go and we can test three sensors while we're here the fresh food sensor that's your refrigerator section the freezer temperature sensor and also your defrost sensor so it measures the temperature on the evaporator coil so from the left one two this will be your fresh food section mine measures out at three point nine eight i'm room temperature right now pretty warm garage and if you go one more to the right four point two to one so roughly the same temperature this is my freezer section and one more to the right now we're four pins over from the left should have a brown wire 4.0 is seven six and this is our evaporator temperature so four point two two inside the freezer and then 4.0 is seven on the evaporator roughly the same for the same temperature on both so that's how you test those three I'll take you to the bench now and show you a quick bench test of how these thermistors work and the response that it sends back to the control board I'm also going to talk about the ways that you can install these now you can do it the easy way or the right way the easy way is just to strip the wires put a wire nut on and call it done but that wire nuts gonna live in a pretty harsh environment with lots of condensation so what will happen is corrosion buildup impacts the sensor read that it's gonna send back to the control board so you'll see why that's important and let's take a look alright now that you know how to test these thermistors at the control board it's a really nice thing to know because now you don't have to cut the thermistor out of the refrigerator just to do that test you can put your leads on the control board and you know what resistance this thermistor is reading so what that means it's a it's a thermal resistor thermistor okay so it's a resistor that changes its resistance based on temperature now in your text sheet they're gonna give you some guidelines to go by I'll also put this up on this screen gives you a little bit more detail as far as reference points but they give us three reference points one is 77 degrees Fahrenheit that means we should read out at four point nine two ohms nine two K ohms and then at 37 degrees roughly the temperature of ice water you should be about 14 K ohms this just gives you a reference point to go by I know that it's 75 degrees in my garage right now so what you'll do is set your meter to ohms resistance take one lead and touch it to one side of the thermistor take your other lead and touch it to the other side so at 77 degrees we should be getting four point nine two we're pretty close here on our meter five point one eight now if I stick this in the ice water which is about 36 degrees somewhere between 34 and 36 degrees we're gonna see this resistance climb and it's gonna climb to roughly 14 K ohms so let's see how it does so here you can see it starting to slow down a little bit and it puts us in the ballpark of that 14 K ohms that we were talking about so that's how you test one of these thermistors it's a resistor that has variable resistance based on temperature and then that resistance is what the control board uses to make its decisions on when to go in to defrost and for how long or when to run the compressor and for how long when to run the fans you get the idea so if one of these thermistors is way out of spec or if it's open if you did your test and and you got this kind of reading you know you clamped it and you're getting an open reading that thermistor for sure has failed you should be getting some kind of resistance like this but with the same test you're telling you're wanting to see if it's way out of spec as well so we should be in the 14 K ohm range at 37 degrees but if we were in fact at 4.9 something you know that well that's the reading for 77 degrees not for 37 so you could say that hey that that thermistor has failed that's way out of spec and that would need to be replaced there's they test them now as I mentioned when it comes time to install one of these there's an easy way and there's a right way what I mean by that is the the quickest easiest way to install one of these things is to strip the wires back I like to strip off about half an inch so I strip off about half an inch these would be the wires coming from your refrigerator or your freezer you've snipped up your old sensor and now you need to install your new one well you take the wires twist them together and throw on a wire tie and call it done you know you do both sides quick and easy and cheap right so now you have your new sensor installed and away you go problem is this sensor lives in an extremely harsh environment when the defrost heater comes on it may see a hundred degrees when it's in a freeze cycle it may see negative fifteen degrees but also all that causes condensation and that condensation ends up inside your wire nut that you just put on here causes corrosion which causes bad connections and this sensor is doing its job but the control board is not getting the the sensors response so it may not go in to defrost it may give wrong temperatures it'll just do wacky stuff you know you've got the Apollo 13 scenario happening inside this wire nut and you can see where that's a bad thing so how I like to do it is take a little bit more time do it the right way because this is not a job you want to do twice it's enough of the hassle that you don't want to tear this thing apart again I like to solder these in place what you'll need you'll need a soldering iron mines have been heating up for about ten minutes you'll need some shrink tubing once you do the solder you want to protect that from the elements go ahead and slide those on to the wires from your refrigerator so they're there once you get everything soldered up and you'll need some solder for movie magic I'm going to use a extra set of hands here and if you've never soldered before it's really not complex what you do is you strip back the wires about half an inch we're gonna twist them together so that they're more or less straight like that what I like to do is put the heat to to the copper where you're going to melt it where you want to add the solder go ahead and add a little dot of solder there at the end you can see the smoke comes out now that I've added some solder to the tip that's gonna help transfer heat better to the rest of this copper then basically just paint the copper wherever it's copper color do you want it to be silver colored then remove the heat give it a second to set up it'll cool down and it changes from a bright silver color like this to more of a dull silver color like the solder itself once that part is done you can give it a tug make sure it's not going anywhere if you're satisfied you got it soldered up well go ahead and slide that shrink wrap over it take a lighter to it and what's so nice about doing it this way unlike that wire to that wire nut that's gonna get condensation and everything in it this is sealed up on the sides so that fresh solder joint that we just did there's gonna be no condensation that gets to that good solid connection it might as well just be one solid piece of wire let's try the other one we've got our shrink wrap already on there twist them together just a word to the wise everything inside a freezer and a refrigerator is plastic so don't set your iron down on plastic good good policy as if it's not in your hand go ahead and set it down outside the refrigerator so once you've got that second one wired up give it a tug everything looks good there slip that shrink wrap over it take the lighter to it this shrink tubing shrinks up to about a third of its original size so basically shrinks up around the original wire keeps your solder joints protected from the elements so that's the correct way to install one of these thermistors again you won't have to do it twice it's there for good so I'll show you how this is done inside there the freezer section but wanted to show you here at the bench just because it's a little easier for the camera sake so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about if you don't have a soldering iron you can pick one up for cheap on Amazon this one is made by vest two and a really good kit it's got the iron of course a little stand to keep it on while you're not using it comes with a solder sucker so if you gave me a control board work good set tweezers which is good for detail work extra tips cleaning sponges the carrying case I'll put the link to that in the description if you need one let me show you how it's done inside the freezer to access the thermistor you'll need to remove all of the drawers and the shelves from your freezer side again with the power unplugged what we'll do is remove two quarter inch nuts with their nut driver from the top right and the top left of this back panel [Music] once those are removed you may have a ground clip it's a green wire that's clipped to the top of that panel let's go ahead and pull that off with your fingers once that's off you may find it easier to remove the light bulb then once that's removed grab in the center of the panel you'll pill you'll pull up as you're pulling towards you that [Music] exposes the evaporator and in the upper left of the evaporator you'll see the sensor that we'll be replacing now as you can see getting a camera into the works here and also doing doing the work I need to do is a little bit tight so I'll do my best to stay out of your way of the camera work here but what we're gonna do is take this sensor it's got a clip on it that clips on the very top part of this evaporator be gentle as you can with this with this tubing it is a sealed system so this clip actually comes off of the sensor itself once the sensor is off the evaporator take your wire cutters give yourself if you still need to test the sensor give yourself some slack to do that this one's trash so we're just going to go ahead and give ourselves as much slack as we can using your fingers just go ahead and separate these two wires so that you can strip them back strip off about a half an inch it's your new sensor we're gonna do the same strip off about half an inch and separate them out don't forget to put your string shrink tubing on first got our new sensor with the shrink tubing on there and you can make this you know you can trim this the length of this sensor up if you wanted to we're just going to zip tie everything together once we get it soldered up make sure it stays out of the way of the fan and whatnot let this cool down for just one second before we put the shrink tubing on go ahead and have your lighter ready it's all a connection take your clip clip your new sensor in place go ahead clip that on to the top left of the evaporator again and now we'll just take this extra wire and we're going to zip tie it out of the way now that our sensors in place wires are zip-tied out of the way we can replace our back panel don't forget this ground clip back on the top of that go ahead and replace your light bulb if you took it out in a previous step make sure not to over tighten these get them snug and then just a little little bit tighter if you crank down on too hard they'll short out the actual housing that's never good congratulations you're all done with your sensor job and there it is that's how you test and replace a defrost sensor on a GE side-by-side refrigerator I hope that helped thanks for watching if you have not already done so please be sure to hit subscribe and a thumbs up it helps a lot

Channel: Grace Appliance

Views: 315,319

Keywords: GE, Refrigerator, Repair, GE refrigerator defrost sensor installation, defrost sensor installation, defrost sensor testing, ge refrigerator temperature sensor test

Id: CG-2FnQ43Hs

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018