Or, A Cautionary Tale About Repairing Your Own Wine Fridge

Our 50-bottle wine fridge has been out of commission for several weeks. It makes a god-awful noise when it’s plugged in and the cooling feature is non-existent. Basically, it’s currently a glorified wine cabinet.

To see if we could diagnose the problem, we pulled the unit out of it’s snug little area for better access to the back. Upon doing so, Eric discovered that the fan unit was entirely coated in dust. Embarrassed that this could be the problem, I tackled the fan with the vacuum, then got the brilliant idea of taking the fan out to clean the blades with a damp paper towel. Except, the screws wouldn’t go back in properly and what the heck are those tiny silver nuts doing on the floor, oh.

(Eric is either rolling his eyes or strangling me at this point of the story. Or both)

And did I mention that the motor on our vacuum cleaner choose this exact moment to die? Yeah.

So after some creative maneuvering with a flashlight and a tiny screwdriver we managed to secure the bottom part of the fan back in place. We plugged in the wine fridge and (amazingly) there were no rattling or groaning noises!

We went to bed praying that when we woke up, the unit would be at a lovely (and quiet) 58 degrees.

Well, the unit is not maintaining a cool 58 degrees and it sounds like it’s being slowly tortured to death. It’s not the fan, so I’m afraid it may be the motor which means we needed to decide if it’s worth spending (enter some obscene amount of money here) to fix a seven year old wine fridge.

Turns out no one will even give us a chance to spend money to fix it because I’ve called eight places with no luck: one made an appointment with me and never showed up, four didn’t deal with wine fridges at all, one never called me back after I left two messages, one said he would come look at it but couldn’t do anything if it was one of three (likely) problems and one guy was just plain weird.

So, as of now, we are wine-fridge-less. :(