Review on Supco Universal UET120 120V Electronic Refrigerator Defrost Timer Control by Jessica Reed

Crappy design, maybe it will fit some fridges but for my Frigidaire mini fridge the mini fridge is obviously too complicated for this, this is the second one I've bought, which is faulty The damn relay in the "high reliability" circuit goes into some sort of dumb oscillation SOMETIMES during the defrost cycle, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for the entire defrost cycle, it's absolutely awful for the reasons given below; They are designed to run during the refrigeration cycle, the compressor is free to turn on and off as determined by the thermostat, during defrost the compressor is isolated from the circuit, unable to turn on and the heater kicks in to melt the frost outside the evaporator coils accumulated; That damn defrost timer goes into a kind of dead state where it pulses constantly and the relay toggles from defrost to cool about 4 times a second. When you turn off the compressor in the refrigerator, the pressure in the system reverses and exerts a tremendous force on the piston, due to which it will not start in this state until the pressure in the refrigeration system is equalized (it just takes some time). If you don't do this, the compressor can burn out because it has power but can't work (how long will your engine and transmission last if you were in "drive" and you have a paddle on the ground and all four wheels locked) that's insane motor wear, luckily modern capacitor motors should have built in thermal protection for failsafe, once the motor gets hot the self resetting thermal reset fuse kicks in to protect the motor, because that piece of shit tried to destroy it, my fridge was spared for that reason. I never thought of such a problem with a semiconductor defrost timer, which of course should be more reliable! I can go back to a motor based timer unless I find that the designer of this circuit skipped "designing circuits with relays 101" and was too stupid to use a diode to absorb the back emf, which resets the clock cycle counter during the defrost phase or whatever.