Maytag freezer not freezing

Put a thermometer in it tonight

Zero degrees is the target and a thermometer left in overnight is the only way to know where you actually are. Then look at the walls: heavy frost on the back wall of an upright means the defrost system has stopped clearing the coil, and a thick layer of ice everywhere in a chest freezer simply means it is due for a manual defrost and is not a repair at all. Check the seal with a slip of paper all the way round, and check the lid or door actually closes on its own rather than resting a fraction open on a package. In a garage — where a great many of these live here — also note the ambient temperature, because a freezer in an unconditioned garage in August is working against far more than it was designed for.

What it usually means, by the kind of machine

One complaint, several machines. This maker still sells a top-load washer with an agitator alongside one without, a front-loader, and a stacked pair, and it sells the same oven as a range and as a wall unit in gas and in electric. The behavior you can describe is identical on all of them; the first hour of the repair is not. A front-load washer has a drain filter the owner can open and a top-loader has nothing to reach from the front, and that single difference decides how the same afternoon goes.

• Upright freezer — Air is circulated by a fan and blown over a coil, which means it can lose the fan, the defrost, or the seal. It also loses more cold every time the door opens because cold air falls straight out of an upright.
• Chest freezer — Usually no fan and no automatic defrost, which removes two of the common causes outright. What is left is the seal, the ice built up on the walls, and the sealed system.
• Freezer half of a refrigerator — Different page — if the fresh food side is also involved, start with the refrigerator rather than here.

Why this page has no codes on it

Every other appliance section of this site links to conditions the maker documents. There are none for freezers — we counted, across the whole published library, and the number is zero. Rather than borrow a code from a refrigerator and imply it applies here, this page says so. What replaces it is a thermometer, a flashlight and a slip of paper, and between them they settle most of these calls.

Garage freezers

An enormous share of the freezers in this region live in an unconditioned garage, and that is the hardest place to ask one to work. Ambient temperatures well over a hundred degrees, dust on the coils, and a door that gets opened with wet hands all add up. Cleaning the coils twice a year rather than once is the difference between a garage freezer that lasts and one that does not.