I’ll spare you the background as there’s ample horror stories of Samsung appliances (especially refrigerators). I would never have bought this one, but it came with the house. To its credit, it’s been working flawlessly the last 5 years, but I knew it was only a matter of time before its Samsung-iness reared its ugly head.
I’m not sure which control board is glitching out, but the symptoms are all in the front panel where the ice/water dispenser is. The fridge still cools, but the front panel is haunted on a good day (cycles through the settings by itself, but you can still use it if you fight it) and just doesn’t work at all on other days. So I guess the fridge still works as long as I don’t wanna do anything crazy like adjust the temperature, select between water and ice, or turn the ice maker on/off. Hurrah?
Ordered a replacement front panel board from ebay and hoping that’s the board that’s at fault. If it’s the “main” control board, I’m probably going to get rid of the fridge.
I have a theory on all these fridge deaths. I suspect the boards inside are being destroyed over time by minor power surges. Get a small surge protector and plug the fridge in to that. Maybe I’m wrong, but its a cheap possible prevention method.
I’ve had it on a UPS for several months because of exactly that. My power’s pretty stable, but when it’s about to go out in a storm/winds, it goes full poltergeist for 2-3 seconds, flashes rapidly, and then either goes out completely or back to normal.
Granted, it raw-dogged power for its whole life until then, so it could have had accumulated damage.