39631UGTAWW General Electric Refrigerator - Instructions

The very first symptom here is important! The door water dispenser is not working but the ice macine is working. You may only have a frozen water tube in the door so do the following before diagnosing that your solenoid valve is bad: 1) the tube usually runs under the front of the refrigerator and usually has a quick disconnect. Undo the connection and press the dispenser. If water comes out of the tube you have a frozen or blocked tube in the door. 2) Immediately adjust the temperature in the freezer and warm the freezer compartment as much as you can without destroying the freezer contents. Wait 24 hours. This will usually unfreeze the line. Do not waste your time with a hair dryer. NOW, if this doesn't work and you are convinced you need to order and replace the solenoid, follow these steps. Assemble your tools first. I needed a good ratchet set and a screwdriver. A shop towel is helpful for spilled water. A light is handy. Pull out the refreigerator to gain access to the rear of the unit. Unplug the power and close the water valve (older homes, you may need to actually shut the house water supply). Remove the screws which hold the cover over the lower half of the refrigerator. On the left you will see the solenoid. It's always good to see that your new part matches the one you feel needs replaced. They may not match perfectly due to changing design but they should be very similar. One screw holds this part in place and access is very simple. Now simply unplug the electrical connections. In my case, one blue "blade" type connection (powering the water) and one red "blade" type connection powering the ice maker. They are not the same size and this coupled with the coloring means you will not accidently switch them. pull the tubes clear of the solenoid. This is simple and needs no explantion. Grab your new solenoid and reattach both the electrical and water lines (two, remember, ice maker and drink dispencer). Replace the single screw. Re-attach the rear, lower refrigerator cover and go to the front of the unit to check the water. You can listen carefully and hear the power engage from the new part bringing you water. Clean up, replace the refrigerator back to its place and look really tired when your wife sees that you worked "so hard"! You probably saved at least $50-$80 from a service call which can now be used to take the family to dinner after your "exhausting" 15 minute workout of removing about 10 screws and wheeling the unit in and out of place. Writing this article took longer! My 4 year old worked harder holding the flash light!

After checking the stories, the consensus of opinion was to change the mother board. I had a tremendous help from Tom Paone at quality@applianceeducator.com. He also told me to change the motherboard but to make sure that the coils were totally defrosted before starting up the refrigerator after changing the board.

Took off three nuts around the board at the back of the unit. Removed the input wires and you have to push in the plastic tabs holding the board in. Then just put the new board in place and push till the tabs click. Re-install the wires and put the cover back on.

Really simple task,

It is now a week since doing this and the unit is working perfectly. No soulds and good nights sleep. The ghost has moved on.

Disclaimer - if you aren't confident about doing this repair, call a repair specialist in. Also, take care not to damage the freezer coils as they have refrigerant in them that I'm told is harmful if it leaks. It may also be under pressure. The instructions that follow won't require you to touch the coils. There is no need to unplug the refrigerator or disconnect the water supply to do this repair. The screw driver you will need is a phillips (the one withe the + head).

1st, take out your frozen food (which, if you need to do this repair may not be frozen) and put it in a cooler or the refrigerator.
2nd, remove the ice cube bucket and dump the ice cubes in the cooler to help keep the frozen food cool. Turn the ice cube maker off.
3rd, remove the freezer shelves.
4th, locate the panel covering the freezer coils. It's a panel at the back of the freezer. It hides the freezer coils and protects them from damage. It's held in place by two screws located at the top left and right corners of the panel.
5th, unscrew the screws holding the panel to the refrigerator.
6th, detach the clip at the top of the panel.
7th, remove the panel. You should see the coils now. The coils will be covered in frost if the defroster heater has failed. If the coils are not covered in frost, there may be another reason for the refrigerator failing to cool.
8th, even if the coils are covered in frost, you should also inspect the defroster heater at the bottom, underneath the coils. The business end of it is a long tube running horizontally between two wires. If it's black like a badly burned out light bulb, then it's failed. If the bulb appears fine, you may have a different reason for your refrigerator and freezer frosting up. We'll assume that the defroster heater has blown out, and proceed.
9th, place a towel at the bottom of the panel space, to soak up any water that melts and runs down. There is a drain under the coils. It collects water that melts during the defrost cycle, but I'd rather mop up the water instead of relying on the drain.
10th, use hot air blowing from the hair dryer to defrost the coils. Just play the air from the hair dryer over the coils, starting at the top, and working down. The frost will quickly melt and the water will be soaked up by the towels. If you want things to go faster, you can throw hot water on the coils to melt them faster, but that produces more water to mop up, and makes a big mess. It's also dangerous to have water lying around if you then decide to use the hair dryer to continue defrosting the coils.
11th. MOST IMPORTANT. Don't use your screwdriver or any other sharp object to pick away at the frost on the coils. If you damage the coils the refrigerant could leak out. I'm told that it's dangerous stuff. Furthermore, I expect that you'd have to buy a new refrigerator if you damaged the coils.
12th, once you've defrosted the coils, locate the defroster heater and bracket assembly again. It's held in place by two screws, and has two insulated wires running into it on either side. Unscrew the screws, disconnect the wires and remove the assembly. Throw it away - there are no useful parts in it.
13th, install the new defroster heater and bracket assembly by connecting the wires to it, mounting it back into its place, and rescrewing the screws.
14th, put the panel back in place, replace the clip, and screw the panel back in place.
15th, turn the ice cube maker back on and replace the ice cube bucket and shelves. Put your food back into the freezer.
16th, use the freezer and refrigerator as normal. If the defroster heater fails again (I'm on my third one in less than six years), you'll notice frost building up on the panel at the back of the freezer before your freezer and refrigerator stops cooling. The frost build up is your signal to defrost the freezer and buy another defroster heater and bracket assembly. I don't know why this part is so weak, and don't know any fix except to keep replacing it.

I went to a GE repair center to explain my problem, the service center reccomended that I have a techinician come out o look at it. $75.00 for the visit and what ever labor and materials wuld cost.

I went on line to see if there were others having this same problem and found that there were many with the same problem.

After reading some of the ways that people found out what was wrong ...it became a matter of three components, the timer, heater or thermostat.

I tried the most common component and the less expensive one first , the thermostat switch I installed it very easily snipping two wires and attaching the news using wire nuts I used the diagram on this website to pinpoint the component and there has not been a problem since.

Model includes filtered ice maker and water dispenser from front of unit. Water maker just suddenly stopped working but ice maker continued to work fine. After some phone calls to trouble shoot at a high level, I figured it was worth a try to buy the replacement part of the most likely culprit and see if it did the trick. Would have cost maybe $150 or more for service tech to make house call, provide the part and do the switch. Buying the part was only $40 and replacement was easy. Remove access panel from behind fridge and identify valve. It has intake water from the filter then has two outbound lines. One to ice maker, one to water dispenser. All function is in one part, but each outbound line has its own functioning valve. Unplug fridge, turn off water supply, disconnect all connections from old valve and reattach to new valve. When re-hooked, be patient in allowing water to re-fill line before coming out of dispenser in front. Likely to doubt it works, but surprised how long it took for water to fill line resevoir.

Unscrew old filter and remove(counterclockwise). Line up arrow on new filter with arrow on connection housing. Turn clockwise till resistance met. Do not overtighten. Follow directions. Simple.

Unplugged the refrigerator, turned off the water supply, and then removed the back cover/access plate. Observed and made wiring notes to ensure I install the part correctly. Unscrewed the bracket holding the water valve assembly, and lifted it up to see and remove the three water lines (one input, two output). The input or supply line is a compression fitting...just use an adjustable wrench to loosen the nut and lift off the line. Then remove the two output lines by depressing or pushing in on the white plastic rings that surround those two holes ...the lines just slide out, but you have to push in on those rings. Remove the two electrical connectors...just wiggle them off One connector was very stubborn but it eventually came off. Try to be gentle, and pull on the connector heads...not on the electrical wires.
Assemble the lines and electrical connectors on to the new part. The two output water lines just slide in...you dont need to push in on the rings. You'l feel them seat into the valve. Don't worry.
Put it all back the way you found it, turn on the water supply, and plug in the power cord. Check for leaks. I had no leaks and was very pleased. This is so easy a chimp can do it, but let everyone think otherwise! No biggie.

My repair experience was a little more complicated than previous posts, but nothing major. And most importantly replacing the Fresh Food Air Inlet Cover did fix my problem. Here are the steps I followed:
1. You will need to remove a minimum of the top two shelves to get access to the Air Inlet Cover. It runs along the back of the fridge and connects to a hole to the freezer side. It has a little fan inside that sucks the cold air from the freezer and diverts to the top and bottom of the fridge.
2. As mentioned in other posts, there are four screws holding the Inlet Cover in place, 2 lower and 2 upper. To get access to the lower two screws,you simply pop off the lower duct assembly (squeeze the sides). Be careful when removing and installing these screws. If you drop one into the lower duct, you will add a few more steps to the installation to remove more shelves and take out the lower duct to get to where the screw fell. Obviously this happened to me. Not difficult to do, just adds more time.
3. To access the upper two screws I had to remove the top light cover (one screw) and then slide out the top duct/diffuser assy (my name, not GE's).
4. Finally to get clearance to pull out the Inlet Cover, I had to remove the water filter and cover. When you pull away the Inlet Cover, you will see the electrical connection that is simple to disconnect.
5. After I removed my Inlet Cover, it was obvious that it was broken because it rattled and I could peek inside to see that the plastic air diverter/flapper thingy was broken.
6. One final surprise was that the replacement Air Inlet Cover did not exactly match the one I removed. The replacement only had one upper air outlet, while my old one had three upper outlets, left, right and center. I noticed there was a plastic cover over one of the side outlets on the replacement, so I just popped that off and hoped for the best.
7. The replacement Air Inlet Cover Kit came with sticky back insulation that you attach to where the Inlet Cover meet the freezer access hole to make sure snug fit to limit extra cold air leaking into the fridge side.
8. Installation of the replacement Air Inlet Cover was fairly easy, just follow the above steps in reverse and make sure you don't drop any screws.
It's been a couple of weeks since I performed this installation and my fridge has been maintaining temperature perfectly. No more frozen milk or lettuce. The wife is very happy.

Unplug refrigerator. First I removed 3 screws to remove cover for Board ASM Main located on back of refrigerator then loosen Board by pressing on each of 4 plastic pins then unscrew ground wire (green) then transfer all plugs from old Board to new Board, put back new board through pins, screw back ground wire then put back cover then plug back refrigerator, took 5 minutes

Since it was making ice I new there was water getting to the water valve on the fridge. I found the water valve on the back of the fridge, put a voltage tester on the water dispenser side of the valve, had someone push in the dispenser flap on the front of the fiidge and found there was 120v. That told me that the switch was good and pretty confident that the valve was bad.
Upon reeceiving the replacement valve I removed both electrical leads on the valve remembering witch side goes to which, turned the water line off, removed the water lines, matched them up to the new one, plugged the leads back in on the valve, turned water back on and tested. There will be a little air in the lines, but once that is out the water will flow at a steady stream.

I removed the old temperature sensor by cutting the wires. I attached the wires of the new sensor with wire nuts and mounted it in the same bracket.

The main board is easy to get to behind the access plate. You will find seven different wire harness plugs, six which are white, that are impossible to remove without breaking the retaining clips which hold them in place....but that's OK.....you are throwing away the old board anyway, so nothing lost. The plugs will snap back into each of their respective terminal locations without a problem. Be sure to treat the four white, plastic pins that hold the board in place delicately....you will not want to mess those little dudes up!

All you have to do is replace the circuit board which is really easy. Still kinda mad because the fridge is less than 2 years old. If you hear the clicking noise its coming from the circuit board.

Well, I first had a local service guy look at the frige. only to find out his opinion was to replace the entire unit, because the Mother board cost more than the unit was worth. Me not accepting that answer, decided to look on line for a part and availability as well as price. Surprise, Part Select had what I wanted. Now, on the back of the unit in the upper left hand corner is the access door for the mother board.Find it, but before proceeding disconnect the power supply from the wall receptacle. Remove the surrounding screws on the access door with a nut driver and the correct size METRIC socket. Disconnect the wiring connectors on both sides of the board. Now there are 4 plastic type (mine were white) retaining studs holding the board in place. BE CAREFUL not to break these as you gently pull the board off studs. Replace board with new one, and restore wire connectors in their perspective places. Each connector has a different amount of pins inside so connecting them is easy. I know nothing about refrigeration, and this was a piece of cake. Less than 15 min. Unit cools like never before!!!

I first shut off water flow to the fridge. Examination of the package (which was not exact in appearance to the original) demonstrated that the electrical connectors were well-insulated so I arrogantly and successfully proceded without disconnecting the power. My fridge is old enough that the model doesn't appear exactly on anyone's list so I wasn't alarmed that it took an extra 10 minutes or so to noodle out how to adapt the slightly different inlet cowling and electrical cord with extension, but the device is pretty simple.
Soon I loosened the two mounting screws with a nut driver, used a screwdriver to pry away the plastic snap-in housing over the electrical socket on the fridge inner wall and pulled away the electrical plug. The original water fill tube remained in its cavity, ready for re-use.
The new unit's mounting points matched the original screw locations perfectly, as did the fill cowling - which on the replacement icemaker has two possible attachment points. The new unit's electrical connector required an extension pigtail to adapt to my socket, but it was included in the package. The extra cable posed a minor cosmetic issue because it hangs in the collection basket a bit, but that will soon be remedied with a tie wrap.
After the water was restored and an anxious wait of a few hours, we had well-formed ice cubes that weren't all stuck together and the stalactites haven't reappeared.