I have been enjoying visiting blogs and decided to start my own, even though I don't know what I am doing or if anyone will even be interested in reading what I have to say. I am a 50 year old management consultant who has been married to the the love of my life for 30 years and have two grown daughters and a son-in-law who we are very proud of. We are blessed to live in Scottsdale Arizona and are enjoying getting out and experiencing it in our RV! Thanks for stopping by our blog and please consider joining us, who knows where we will go...Kevin & Tracy.

Monday, June 25, 2012

A Quick $450!

As many of you know, we are aggressively paying off our home using Dave Ramsey's principals that I described in my earlier post.  As part of this plan, we paid off 40% of our home loan two weeks ago and we then experienced Murphy, just as Dave predicted.  Murphy is that unexpected expense that most people do not plan for, fortunately we planned for Murphy and have budgeted for challenges like we faced on Sunday.

We returned from church and I was watching the golf tournament and decided that it was Miller time.  I went to the refrigerator to get an ice cold Miller Lite and discovered that it was warmer than usual. I went out to our motor home and retrieved our temperature gauge and placed it in our refrigerator.  The temperature was 50 degrees, which was higher than normal.

Warm Beer!
In pulling our paperwork, we discovered that we bought the refrigerator in 2007 and even though we purchased an extended warranty for two years, we were on our own, because our warranties had expired.

We have a database in our office of home repair people who we have used and were happy with, so I called a contact that we had for appliance repair.  I contacted them and they said they would be at our home between 11:30am - 12:30pm.

I had client meetings during this time, so Tracy was on call to meet with the repair person. Tracy described Steve as a very knowledgeable and nice guy who seemed to know immediately what the problem was.  He said that the control panel was shot and needed to be replaced.  When we bought our house 19 years ago, the former owners left their refrigerator, which had to be 10 years old.  We had that refrigerator for over 10 more years without any issues until I decided that we needed stainless steel appliances throughout our kitchen and so we replaced our great operating unit for one that would last us for only five years.

Steve said that our KitchenAid refrigerator was manufactured by Whirlpool and that their control panels were manufactured in Japan at a factory which was destroyed in the Tsunami.  As a result, remanufactured control panels were the only ones available.  We were pleased to find out that the control panel that he purchased and installed was brand new rather than remanufactured.  Hopefully, this one will last at least five more years.

So, we are back up and running...the Miller Lite is very cold again and although we lost some meat and eggs, we are once again good to go!

That is it for our excitement today, hopefully yours was more exciting and much less expensive.  Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

4 comments:

  1. Looks suspiciously like our fridge, which I installed back in 2001? (memory's dim)
    It's still going. Finger's crossed. Only had an issue with the drain tube being blocked. *Note* if opening frozen peas, make damned sure the bag is closed again?
    Anyway, it replaced a used fridge that I bought in about 95 or so that REFUSED to die. It got moved downstairs where it continued to chug along until there was some 'deal' where the municipality (you'd call it the "township" I suppose) was willing to pick up old fridges. I knew it wasn't the most efficient, so it finally had to go. I think that old fridge was over 30 years old when we parted company. It still ran, even though I'm sure it used the energy of three or four modern ones.
    Hope that's the last part you'll need for a long time.

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    1. Bob - You are correct, the drain tube was completely frozen and according to Steve, this cuts off air to control panel, causing it to overhead and to short out. Tracy said he used a hair dryer to heat the drain tube and get it flowing again. I was not home at the time, so I need to contact him to figure out how to do this so that we don't have the problem again in the future. Alays something!

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  2. Such a good feeling to pay down that mortgage, even better once its gone!
    They just don't make things to last anymore, but at least you got cold Miller again.

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  3. Thanks for the warm welcome.
    Appliances just don't last very long anymore no matter what your pay for them. I hope this new panel lasts more than 5 yrs.

    You need to come up the temps have dropped since the rain moved in.

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