Fridge leaking water

What it usually means

Every fridge makes water, and a healthy one gets rid of it without anyone knowing. Understanding where that water comes from is most of this fault: it arrives as humidity in the air, every time the door opens. The coldest surface in the cabinet collects it, and on a frost-free appliance that surface is the evaporator hidden behind the rear wall of the fridge compartment. Frost forms there while the appliance cools, a heater melts it off on a timed cycle, and the meltwater runs down a moulded channel to a small hole at the bottom of that rear wall. From there a tube takes it to a shallow tray sitting on the compressor, where the heat of the compressor evaporates it back into the room.

That is why a fridge has no reservoir to empty, and why a blocked drain hole has nowhere to put the water. Food debris, a label off a jar or a film of the sugary residue that builds up over a few years is enough to stop it, and once it stops the water backs up in stages. First it collects in the channel and freezes into a ridge across the back. Then it spreads forward under the salad drawer, which is the classic complaint of half an inch of water under the crisper. Then it reaches the front lip and runs out onto the kitchen floor. Water under the drawer and a puddle by the door are the same fault a fortnight apart, not two problems.

The freezer version behaves differently and is worth telling apart. Its drain sits under the bottom drawer, and when it blocks the water freezes where it lands, so the first sign is a sheet of ice growing across the freezer floor rather than a leak. The leak comes later, when the appliance is opened often enough for some of that ice to melt. This is the point at which the temptation to attack it with something sharp becomes dangerous: the evaporator pipework runs inside the walls and the floor of the compartment, most domestic fridges sold here are charged with flammable isobutane, and a chisel through a pipe ends the appliance and fills the kitchen with gas.

Two other sources produce water in the same places and want ruling out. If the appliance is plumbed for an ice maker or a chilled water dispenser, then it has mains water inside it, and a leak from that circuit is continuous rather than intermittent and can be a great deal of water. And if the amount of condensate has simply gone up — a seal that no longer pulls the door shut, a door held ajar by a bottle in the rack, warm food going straight in, a hot kitchen in August — a drain that was coping can stop coping without ever being blocked. One thing you can rule out immediately: refrigerant is a gas at room pressure, so anything wet on your floor is water.