How To Keep Your Refrigerator Alive for Longer

It’s a sad fact of life that your expensive, hard-earned refrigerators sometimes stop working. Whether you are hard at work attempting to create some tasty treats for your next dinner party or simply trying to beat the heat in the summer, you can be left with a fridge that doesn’t keep food cool any more. Here are a couple of tips on how you can keep your refrigerator alive and kicking.

Don’t keep it open for too long

Don’t keep your fridge open for too long. When you open the refrigerator door, it creates a vacuum. That vacuum is what keeps the cold air inside the fridge and prevents it from escaping into your kitchen. If you leave the door open too long, however, the cold air will escape from inside and warm air will get in through the seal around the door. This could cause your food to spoil faster or even damage your appliance.

Keep the coils clean

The most important thing to do is keep the coils of your refrigerator clean. If they get clogged with dust and debris, they lose their efficiency. Cleaning them will make sure your refrigerator runs at maximum capacity and keeps food fresh for longer.

Cleaning the coils of your refrigerator can be done once a month or so, depending on how much you use it and how often you have to defrost it.

All you need to do is unplug your fridge from the wall, flip it over onto its back, and remove any removable parts like shelves or drawers. Then take a vacuum cleaner with an attachment nozzle (the type used for cleaning furniture) and suck out any dust or dirt that may have accumulated around the coils.

If there’s still some left after this, wipe it off with a damp cloth.

Keep it full, but not too full

You want to make sure there’s enough room for air to circulate around everything inside the fridge; otherwise, things will start to rot quickly. But don’t overdo it either — if you put too much stuff in there, it won’t be able to cool everything down as efficiently as it should. So stick with things like meat and dairy products that need to be kept cold at all times.

Clean up spills right away

If something leaks or spills inside your fridge, clean it up immediately so that bacteria doesn’t have time to grow on top of whatever spillage you’ve got going on in there. Make sure you wipe down any shelves or drawers after washing them with warm soapy water — bacteria can hide out in those cracks and crevices if you don’t get them cleaned out regularly (and thoroughly).

So there you have it, a comprehensive guide to refrigerator maintenance for anybody who owns one. Heck, maybe some day you’ll get to be the person who teaches all of this to the person who maintains our refrigerators, because that’s what we do—we pass knowledge down from generation to generation so that we’re all better off as a society!