A refrigerator that has stopped holding temperature is the one call the office moves everything else around. The technician arrives with a thermometer, a clamp meter and a plan: find where the cold is being lost, put one figure on a card, and fit nothing until you have read it.
$95 run-through · refrigerator repair labor from $260 · part on its own line · how the money works
The run-through on a refrigerator starts at the back of the cabinet, not the front. Condenser coil, condenser fan, the start relay and the compressor’s running current get checked in that order, because between them they explain most warm boxes on this island and cost the least to put right. Only then does the technician move inside — evaporator frost pattern, defrost heater, the damper between the freezer and the fresh-food side, the gasket, the door switch. Every reading goes on the card next to the figure it produced.
Nearly every kitchen on this map is within a mile of salt water, and that shows up at the connectors before it shows up in the parts. A fan that quits at four years on Harbor View Road has usually lost its plug to corrosion, not its motor; a start relay that fails on Folly has often been sitting on a green spade terminal for a season. The run-through meters both ends of a connection before it condemns what hangs off it, and repaired connections go back with dielectric grease and the street book notes which ones.
Second refrigerators are the other island habit — the garage box in a Fort Johnson ranch, the drinks fridge under a raised house on Sol Legare, the freezer on a screened porch in Riverland Terrace. Those run at the edge of their design all summer, and the card on one is written against what a cabinet in that spot is worth: sometimes a relay plus a coil cleaning buys five more years, sometimes the honest line says buy a smaller one and put it indoors.
Built-in and panel-front units — Sub-Zero, Thermador, Liebherr, the paneled Bosch and KitchenAid columns in the renovated kitchens west of the Wappoo — get the same run-through with more patience: panels off without scarring the cabinetry, every plug photographed before it is pulled. The crew holds no factory authorizations and does not pretend to; the card says what was measured and what it costs, and that is the whole pitch.
The likely, inexpensive cause is measured before the unlikely, expensive one is named.
| What you notice | What gets read first |
|---|---|
| Fresh-food side warm, freezer cold | Evaporator frost pattern, damper, evaporator fan |
| Clicks every few minutes | Start relay, compressor draw, condenser airflow |
| Ice sheet on the freezer back wall | Defrost heater, defrost thermostat, drain |
| Water under the crisper drawers | Defrost drain, drain pan, door gasket |
| Runs without stopping | Condenser coil, condenser fan, gasket, door switch |
| Cabinet sweats in summer | Mullion heater, gasket, room humidity |
Warm boxes take the first open technician, and the island is the crew’s home turf — most weekday calls before noon are seen the same day. Keep both doors shut until the van arrives; a closed box holds for hours.
On a young built-in, sometimes. On a ten-year-old freestanding box, the card almost always says no, and it says so in writing with the reading that proves it. Nobody on the crew sells refrigerators, so the line has nothing behind it but arithmetic.
Airflow or defrost, nine times in ten: an evaporator buried in frost, a damper jammed shut, or an evaporator fan that has stopped. All three are on the run-through and none is a long job. It is rarely the compressor when the freezer still freezes.
Garage boxes on the island, alcove boxes in West Ashley, under-house boxes on the beach, old circuits downtown — each area page says what the run-through expects.
Alcove boxes on extended wiring, porch freezers under the oaks.
Old circuits, tight kitchens, landlord fleets.
French-door boxes in fifties alcoves with no air behind them.
Tell the office what it is doing; the run-through does the rest.
$95 run-through, any machine, any street on the map · labor from-rates published · parts on their own line