Refrigerator Drips Water Inside From Freezer Clogged Condensate Drain Line

Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates the KFM method for unclogging clogged condensate drains in refrigerators that are causing water to drip from the ceiling of the fridge.

We’ve got a clogged condensate drain line here. Fixed the fan motor, so that’s all set. That’s the first thing to check for if your fridge isn’t working, is to check if the fan motor’s stuck.

Now we’re going to need to defrost the condensate drain lain so that the water can drain properly and not clog up back there and create ice blockage. Because what happens is down here, you’ll get ice blockage. And that’ll block the circulation of the air from your freezer down into the fridge.

It’s kind of funny that the longer screws go in the front in this particular model. Each model is a little bit different, so this is just giving you the general idea here of what you may be dealing with. This is a frost free refrigerator, so it has a defrost cycle.

Looks like it’s started to melt. A little bit of ice down here sometimes forms on the coils. We’ve got all kinds of ice buildup back here. You can see in the aluminum pan as well as around here. So we’re going to chip all this out. You want to be careful.

This particular fridge has all plastic parts, so it’s fairly easy to chip this stuff off. On other fridges you may have to take a different method to melt it all out. Because if it has aluminum back there, it’s easy to puncture the aluminum. And that may cause you to develop a refrigerant leak, so you want to be cautious of that, careful of that.

To defrost this thing, I used to microwave water and run that, pour that over the defrost once you’ve got this all chipped out. And it would take forever. Pour it in, and once it got warm, then vacuum it out. And then you repeat the cycle over and over. Pour it in, vacuum it out. Pour it in, vacuum it out.

I got a lot easier way, which is If you have a turkey baster, just to fill that turkey baster. And then squirt that in there. Blast your ice blockage out with warm water or hot water. I can show you an alternate method if you don’t have a turkey baster, because I don’t have a turkey baster with me all the time and you probably don’t have one with you all the time, either.

You want to avoid deforming the aluminum plate back here. It fits out nice and easy and you can see all our ice in there. This is where our condensate drain line is, right here. It’s just all plugged in. Break all this out.

Again, you want to be careful not to puncture anything down there. It’s one thing to get it done, it’s another thing to get it over done. You run this through your garbage disposal, that’ll sharpen up the blades. The ice is good for sharpening up disposal blades, bit of a double whammy.

This is our channel here. This actually looks like it’s broken apart a little bit. But it’s still functional, as long as it maintains its shape, just directs the air down there. Down into the fridge. You want to be careful when pulling these out to avoid breaking that.

If it did break, try to put it back together so that it performs its job function. You can glue them back together if you need to, if you did break one. One like this, it’s still holding its shape. It can still do its job.

Now what we’re going to do is take hot water and put it down there. Again, if you have a turkey baster, that’ll make this a lot easier. I’m going to show you a KungFuMaintenance trick here. What you do is take a water bottle filled with hot water and then take a knife, or I’m going to use my screwdriver, and just poke a hole in the top up here.

Now we’re going to squirt the stream. Squirt a nice stream into the drain and I’ll use that to squirt it out as if it was a turkey baster. So just aim your stream in there. Squirt it out there.

And once it gets built up a ways, what you could do is use a wet/dry vacuum to vacuum that out. Here goes a little noise from my wet/dry vacuum to vacuum this out here.

[VACUUMING]

I’m going to go ahead and widen up my hole here and see if I can make my stream a little bigger and a little more direct so I can aim it down there a little better. Oh yeah, that’s better. I’m just going to vacuum it out again.

[VACUUMING]

We’ll aim our stream right down there again, nice and strong this time. It appears we’re clear, so now what we want to do is dump another good amount of water down there. We’ll avoid it going in the fridge and just make sure everything drains really good and clears out really good just to prove that we’re actually empty and clear here. And you can see it going down.

Now our drain line’s clear and we’re ready to put everything back together. To put this back together, we’re going to put our aluminum sheet back in there, making sure we straight out anything that got bent. So here’s this piece right here, got bent. Avoid deforming this pan.

This slides up underneath the coils. The coils are back here, so you just want to pull these forward a little bit and press this into place. Then we’re going to reinsert our Styrofoam channel here. And now we’re ready to reset our freezer cover pan .

It’s got these feet back here that fit underneath. Deep channel right here, so I’ll just push it up into place. There’s always one out of place.

Now on this one, you’re going to think the short screws would be on front, but it’s actually backwards on this model. You just need to remember the way that it is on yours. Note how your screws go in and how your fridge works.

It’s probably a good time to clean this fridge pan and everything, but that’s another story. Back here, make sure that’s in nice and straight, and then our freezer channel goes in like so. And there’s two feet back here. We’re going to slip those in and then press it down, the whole thing gets pressed down.

So that is locked into place and you can’t pull it out. Again, each fridge is a tiny bit different but that’s the way this one is. We’ll set our screws back. And now we’re ready to install the freezer tray.

And these just insert into the two holes, and this you press into place nice and gently. And now our freezer is installed and we can put our ice trays back in. Might want to start with some fresh water there.

And we’re all set there. That’s how to fix a frozen condensate line. I set our temperature control back at about five, which is about normal for this particular one. Anyway, we’re good to go there, nice and clear.