Rick's b.log - 2022/07/10
It is the 8th of May 2024 You are 18.116.62.45, pleased to meet you!

Paper Girls

My fridge is broken

The ice compartment is not a closed unit, it's basically a piece of metal in the shape of a box screwed into place at the top. As such, it has quite a tendency to ice up in and around it. So periodically, when the fridge starts to act weird, I need to defrost it.

Usually "act weird" means it struggles to maintain the preset temperature as the sensor, being within the iced up part, perceives things to be colder than they really are.
This time, it seemed to prefer to be too cold. I knocked back the setting, but this didn't seem to make much difference.

I took everything out of the fridge yesterday and put it into cool bags or the cool box. I defrosted the fridge, and all seemed well. It was plugged back in, and I waited until it had reached a cold enough temperature. The setting was the lowest, so I could imagine it stopping before it got too cold.

Well, it hit -1°C on the centre shelf (I have a little bluetooth sensor) and kept going. As a side note, I observed that it was hovering around -10°C during it's normal running, as it wouldn't have turned off.

From this, there's only one conclusion that can be drawn. The thermostat has packed up. I'm not sure why it has picked now, but there you go. It is an oldish fridge, I think we got this around 2005 or so. So it's done about 17 years of keeping stuff cold. But with my dinky car and places like supermarkets not being willing to deliver, getting a new fridge would probably involve Amazon and, oh my god... Just... oh my god.

I opened the thing up and found a fairly generic Chinese thermostat unit inside.

Fridge thermostat - a WPF21D.

There's a tag at the bottom for an earth connection, and two at the top. One is for power input, the other for power output to the compressor. It's a simple switch.

I found a similar looking unit on Amazon for something like €13. There were cheaper options, but this one should be here by Tuesday.

Replacement thermostat.

It looks like the usual knock-off part, but as long as it works...

For now, I'm using a mechanical timer, with a cycle of one stop (15 minutes) on, five stops (75 minutes) off. It's basically a quarter hour every hour and a half.

Fridge timer.

This seems to be keeping it between -1°C and 2°C, which will do. Given the food in there, I'd rather err on the side of cold than too warm.

Fridge temperature on timer.

I just hope the replacement thermostat works.

EuroMillions

230 million euros.

WTF? Seriously, WTactualF? One silly little slip of paper could, on Tuesday night, be worth nearly a quarter of a beeeellion euros.

This is, incidentally, the current jackpot cap. It won't go higher. Well, not yet.

But still... this isn't "dream come true" money as the radio advert says, it's stupid money.

Of course, I'll be playing as usual. But my dreams are not ambitious enough to make a dent in that. I'd like a toilet that works, heating that works, and a car that doesn't make endless weird noises...

That parcel

The label said, very clearly, and in French "sans signature".

So La Poste cocked up four times.

• The parcel tracking number was unknown. I had actually managed to read the scrawled writing correctly.
• The number of the advice slip was unknown, hence why the parcel people and the letter people each said it was the other one.
• The automatic virtual assistant is a complete nightmare to work with if you are not French. I get that using a 'bot helps you employ fewer people because often it's a pretty simple demand. But for a human one can say "u comme uniform", "z comme zébra" and so on. For a machine? And, trust me, it's bloody difficult to correctly pronounce the French 'u' (not 'oo', not 'uh', not 'er'). I know, my name has one. These days I don't even bother, I just hand over my identity card and the person can read it for themselves.
• And, when I finally made it to the Post Office, was handed a package that said "NE PAS FLASHER - SANS SIGNATURE" alongside a piece of paper to sign.

Well done, La Poste. Have a smiling poop emoji... 💩

Your comments:

David Pilling, 11th July 2022, 03:46

"Don't cut the capillary tube to length" - that's what they told me when I bought a replacement fridge thermostat. Would I have done... maybe.

Rob, 13th July 2022, 17:49

On the back of this, I decided to take a flutter on the Euros. Bought two lucky dips, for £5. Got an email 1am this morning "You're a winner; check the website to see what you won." Excitement overload!!     Except it refused to let me sign in! "Try again later."    I eventually got to bed, and had forgotten about it when I woke up. Just remembered and checked, an hour ago.    I won £3.20.

Rick, 13th July 2022, 19:10

Four lines, not a bean...    Amazingly, the big prize is still up for grabs. Nobody won it, which meant the second level prize was ~€4.5M! It's usually around 150-300K!