Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

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Have you ever been through a high risk pregnancy? Especially one that comes after losses?

There's a lot to deal with, a lot you are juggling, and a lot on your mind. And in our case, the mold on our old fridge only showed up again once it got warm enough and wet enough - it showed up last summer but there was a chance we'd killed it. Once it showed up, we realized we needed to replace it and it took us a few weeks to get that sorted on top of everything else we needed to do. Even just having to replace our old fridge at all was pushing the edges of our bandwidth.

We ordered it with two months to spare - our due date was late July. The delivery date was a full month ahead of our due date. They missed the window, our delivery date got moved up, and here we are.

Also, if you'd read on, you'd have found that for the first two days, they seemed to be trying to work with us and we were perfectly happy with that.

I wrote this up because a) they failed to follow through on their end at every turn and then started stonewalling us and b) their front line support seemed just as trapped in their system as we were, and downright terrified when they are left unable to help a customer (which the reps we were interacting with quickly were).

I’m not really following the part with the mold - can you not pull the fridge out and give it a deep cleaning, or worst case hire someone who specializes in that to do so?

We did that last year. Pulled it out from the wall, twice. Sprayed it down completely with bleach. Let the bleach sit. Sprayed it down again.

We had to spray down the walls as well, because each time it had already grown to the walls.

After the second time, I thought we might have killed it, because it didn't come back. But I think that was just the weather changing.

It showed up again a month or two ago.

Each time I pulled it out to clean it, I got a headache from the bleach. I don't think I'm going to have to bandwidth to deal with all that when we're sleep deprived with a newborn. And we also don't want to risk further mold spread to the rest of the house.

I suspect that it's hiding out in areas of the fridge that I can't reach in the back. There's insulation, and the internals around the coils that are really hard to reach.

It's a really old fridge too. I don't actually know how old because I inherited it with my previous house, which I moved into in 2012. It was already old then, so it's at least a decade old and then some. Our old house was super moldy. So it's not surprising it infected the fridge.

Edit: I suppose we could try hiring someone. But I honestly think it's partly just that infected, and partly that the insulation has worn down over time, so that it stays cold enough on the outside to collect condensation and create a perfect mold environment in the summer. We try to minimize our use of AC and use fans and windows instead, so our house is a pretty humid and warm environment in the summer.

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