Talk to a technician

What to tell us when you call from Carlsbad

Have one answer ready before anything else: which compartment is wrong. On a Sub-Zero built-in the refrigerator and the freezer are cooled by two separate sealed systems and no air passes between them, so a warm refrigerator sitting over a hard-frozen freezer and a unit that has gone warm on both sides at once are two different jobs with two different parts lists. After that, the model number if you can reach the plate, which on built-in refrigeration sits inside the door frame or behind the lower grille, any code showing on the display, and roughly when the trouble started.

Tell us which part of the city you are in, because in Carlsbad that changes the van load as much as the route. West of the freeway, in Olde Carlsbad and on the streets above Batiquitos Lagoon, we load condenser and gasket stock first, since salt in the onshore air dulls a fin pack and takes the set out of a door seal well ahead of the schedule printed in the manual. In La Costa, Bressi Ranch and the blocks running east toward Rancho Santa Fe Road it is evaporator fans, defrost heaters and thermistors, because inland units here fail from the inside of the cabinet outward. The city runs from the sand up into the hills and the same refrigerator does not fail the same way at both ends of it.