Part · Viking built-in refrigeration
What the compressor does in a Viking refrigerator — and how it fails
In one sentence
It is the pump that drives refrigerant round a closed loop, and it takes the blame more often than it earns — most warm Viking cabinets are beaten by dust, a stalled fan or a tired door. — Viking Repair Denver Pros, (720) 903-2603
What it does
Picture a closed circuit of tubing with a pump at one end. The pump squeezes refrigerant gas until it is hot and under pressure, pushes it out to the coil behind the grille where the heat leaves, and the refrigerant arrives back as liquid ready to boil again inside the cabinet and take up more heat. That pump is the compressor, and it is the only part of the loop that does any work. Everything else either feeds it, cools it or distributes what it produces.
How it fails
Compressors rarely die politely. The familiar ending is one that will not start: power arrives, the starting components try, the motor cannot turn its own load, the protector cuts in and the whole attempt repeats a few minutes later as a click from the next room. A second ending is quieter and worse — it runs, it sounds normal, and it no longer builds the pressure the loop needs, so the cabinet holds a temperature somewhere between cold and not cold at all.
Almost none of the calls that begin with that word turn out to be one. A coil under a mat of dust, a stopped fan, a door that has quietly stopped sealing, a defrost system that has iced the cold side over: each of those makes a machine run constantly and still lose temperature, and each is ordinary work on a sound unit. They are ruled out before anybody reaches for the expensive word.
Opening the sealed loop is not a homeowner job in any circumstance. Refrigerant must be recovered rather than released, by a technician certified under EPA Section 608, and the joints are brazed rather than unscrewed. That is also why the diagnosis comes first and the figure second: nothing here is guessed at from the doorway.
Can you check it yourself?
No — and this is why.
No, and not partly. The loop is sealed and under pressure, and opening it to recover the refrigerant is federally regulated work rather than a matter of tools. What helps is listening and reporting: whether it starts at all, whether it runs then stops after a minute or two, and whether the noise is new.
Repair band
Compressor or sealed-system repair $1,370 to $3,400
The $89 visit buys the diagnosis and the figure for your own unit. Nothing is opened further and no part is ordered until you have seen that figure and said yes. Viking Repair Denver Pros, (720) 903-2603.
Follow-up questions
Could the fault be something cheaper than this?
By eliminating the cheap things on the meter, in order. Airflow across the hot coil, the fan that provides it, the fan inside the cabinet, the starting components, the door and the defrost side all get tested first, because each of them produces the same warm box. Only what survives that list gets named.
Is a refrigerator worth repairing at that level?
Often, on a built-in. A cabinet fitted into joinery with panels matched to the kitchen is not swapped out the way a freestanding one is, and the band below covers the work rather than a replacement. Viking Repair Denver Pros gives you the figure for your own unit before anything is opened, (720) 903-2603.
Symptoms it causes
If your unit is doing one of these, this part is on the list of things that get tested.
- Written by
- Clifford Nakamura
- Role
- Service technician — controls and intermittent faults
- Last checked