Common fault
Why is there water under my refrigerator?
Short answer
Water under a built-in comes from one of two places, and Cardiff's marine layer makes the first of them far more common here than it is a few miles inland.
What is actually going on
The defrost drain ices shut, the melt has nowhere to go, and it works its way out at the base of the cabinet. Or the ice maker's supply line has let go at a fitting. You can tell them apart by looking: clear water at the toe kick with a clean freezer floor is the supply line, while a sheet of ice inside the freezer and cloudy water outside it is the drain. Either repair is small. In a beach house with wood floors, the damage from waiting overtakes the price of the repair inside a few days.
What we check, and in what order
The drain gets more work in this climate than the designers assumed. Higher ambient humidity means more moisture condensing on the evaporator, which means more melt water at every defrost cycle, and a drain that is only partly clear copes in a dry climate and does not cope in this one. Once it closes, the water finds the lowest way out of the cabinet. That is why the puddle usually appears at the front by the toe kick rather than anywhere near the actual fault.
We flush the drain, trace the path through to the pan, and check the drain heater where the unit has one, because a drain that has iced closed once will do it again if the heater is not working. When it turns out to be the supply line, the fitting is the part that matters. These give up at the joint, not along the run, so putting in a fresh length of tube and reusing a tired fitting simply books you a second visit next month.
If that matches what yours is doing, say so when you call — it decides which parts come on the van.
Reviews
What Cardiff-by-the-Sea customers say
I scraped the back wall of the freezer twice and the frost was back inside a week both times. He read the heater and the sensor before touching anything, then found the gasket had softened along the hinge side. Sitting between the ocean and the lagoon, that made sense.
Thermador oven wouldn't hold temperature. Second outfit we'd had out; the first just read the display and left. This one came next morning, found the sensor had drifted, done inside the hour. Tidy, no upsell.
There was a hum behind the grille that got louder all spring, worse at night when the house was quiet. Corroded bearing in the condenser fan, plus a fair bit of beach sand in the blade path. He had the motor with him and swapped it there and then.
Rated 4.9 from 478 customer reviews.
Appliance down in Cardiff-by-the-Sea?
Tell us the brand and what it is doing — we can usually name the likely repair before we arrive.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How soon can someone get to Cardiff, and is the line really answered at night?
Yes, around the clock, every day of the week, and same-day service happens whenever the day still has room. We would rather tell you tomorrow morning than hold a window we cannot keep. Work sits inside 92007 and the towns either side, so what decides the timing is whether the part your symptom points to is already on the van.