Slim on a hot tin roof.

Freezers are supposed to stay below 32 degrees, right?  Well, Chevron’s decided it liked 45 better.  We didn’t notice until a customer came up with a bag of ice that had a puddle of water in the bottom.  They’re not supposed to do that.

I checked all the breakers, the fans were working and I couldn’t find anything to adjust the temp with.  So I called the manager and he suggested I flip the breakers to the freezer, let them reset, and flip them back on.  No go.

So he called the repair dude, who suggested I call him and he could talk me through a few troubleshooting things.  I checked the copper tube thingy, which was hot and wasn’t supposed to be.  Then he (the repair dude) asked me if I could get up on the roof.  Um, ok, it’s just 30 or 40 feet straight up this ladder bolted to the outside of the building.  I need to get the keys to the ladder, so I tell him that I’ll call him back when I’m up on the roof.  I text the manager to ask him if we have keys to the roof at the store, and then mention it to the guy I’m working with. He goes “Yeah, right there with the other keys, the ones marked ‘Roof’.”  Duh! Should have asked him before texting the manager.

I get up on the roof, call repair dude back and he has me check the copper tube up there.  Hot too.  Not good.   So he says to get a long hose, haul it up there and spray out the compressor.  Ok, more fun getting up that ladder carrying a hose with me.  Fortunately the spray nozzle hooked onto the ladder rungs perfectly so I could put it up a couple rungs, climb up, move the hose up, climb more and so on all the way up.

The rest was kind of relaxing, standing there spraying down the compressors.  I figured I might as well do them all while I was there.  A lot of dirt came out as I sprayed them, which was a good sign because that meant that most likely was the problem.  I called repair dude back and he had me check the copper tubing again, which was no longer hot.  He was happy with that.  He then asked me to keep an eye on the freezer temperature for a while and then call him back.  The temp went way down to 20 degrees, I called him and told him, texted the manager too, and repair dude said to let him know if it starts to get too warm again.

Two hours later it was at 20 degrees again (we had a little spike when we had the door open restocking the ice bags) and I left a note for everyone to keep an eye on it over the weekend.  I told the manager that the note said “if it hits 30, sell”, but I actually told them to call him.

Troubleshooting is fun, and it’s especially enjoyable when I can actually fix the problem.  So even though I ended up staying an hour and a half longer than I was supposed to, it wasn’t so bad.  At least I got paid for it.