THE TALE OF THE MYSTERIOUS LEAK

Today's post was written by my wife, Judy, better known here as SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed).  While the BRD (Beautiful Rich Daughter) was in Mexico last week, SWMBO house-sat for her and her three cats in Prescott, about 100 miles away.  Here then is her story of her return and an ensuing adventure.

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I got home Friday after being gone for a week .  Unpacked my stuff and went through a week's worth of mail. Did some reading.  Went to bed and got some sleep.

Saturday morning at 8:00 a.m. I walked into the kitchen to find a stream of water running from the refrigerator across the kitchen.   Decided that the evaporator pan must be over-flowing for some reason.  We moved the monster double door fridge out far enough to get behind.  As I was gathering tools to remove the back panel of the fridge, Bruce decided to get the hell out of there and go to the store.

I removed the LOWER BACK panel.  This didn't do a whole lot for my lower back.  There were about eight screws to undo. I used a refrigerator coil brush (didn't think I had one, did you) and the crevice tool of the vacuum cleaner to remove dust, cobwebs and cat hair from everything I could reach.  The evaporator fan started running while I was doing this, so I decided it had been jammed up with debris. I took the front panel off and vacuumed under there too. Now all would be well. I mopped up the water for the third or forth time, but decided to leave the fridge out in the middle of the room...just in case.

Then I went away for a while and came back ....to another stream of water.  I went online for solutions and everyone talked about the evaporator pan, etc.  One guy mentioned the drain hole in the back of the inside of the fridge which could be stopped up by food debris.  Use a pipe cleaner to clear it out and run some water down it and your problem should be solved.  So after about an hour on the computer looking for solutions I went back to the kitchen.  I took the bottom crisper drawer out and found about 1/2 to 3/4 inch of water in the bottom of the fridge.  The puddle had not been coming from the outside/underside of the fridge.  It was coming from the INSIDE.

So I took the next crisper drawer out......and the meat and cheese drawer, cleaned them and set them on the floor.  Still no evidence of where the water was coming from. So, I emptied the rest of the three shelves of the upper part.  Food all over the kitchen. As I got to the top shelf I could see some water dripping down the back left  side. That is the shelf that our box of red wine and our cold water container and tall bottles, like coke and milk sit on.  About this time Bruce (who had slunk back from the grocery store) mentioned that a leftovers container had had water on top of it this past week when he took it out of the fridge.  I took EVERYTHING off the top shelf and they all were wet on the bottom.  It suddenly dawned on me that it might be that the cold water container, which I had filled the night before, and was now half empty.....MIGHT BE THE CAUSE!  Within a minute, Bruce, who was watching a football game across the room said, "It might be the water container".   I dried it off completely and set it on a paper towel to see what would happen. In seconds, the paper towel was soaking wet.

I have the cleanest refrigerator in the state...inside and out.   But there is no water container in there right now. 

That's all, folks!