How to Maintain Proper Refrigerator Temperature

Keeping your refrigerator full helps maintain the temperature.

If you are having trouble maintaining proper refrigerator temperature in your home unit, there are a number of things you can do to keep your refrigerator chilled and your food preserved, even on the hottest of days. Though hardware failure is always a possibility, most problems originate entirely through human error. User errors can easily be corrected and accounted for in the future. So, before you call the repairman to diagnose why your refrigerator temperature is off, follow through the steps below and make sure you are doing all you can to maintain proper refrigerator temperature.

Instructions

1. Use a refrigerator thermometer. This is the only way to know for sure what exactly is going on inside your refrigerator. The ideal refrigerator temperature is going to be about 35 to 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Any lower and water will freeze and any higher and you will dramatically increase bacteria's ability to reproduce.

2. Keep the door closed as much as possible. It goes without saying that the longer you spend with the door open, the more cold air you are going to let out, especially when it is a warm day and the ambient temperature in your kitchen is far below proper refrigerator temperatures.

3. Learn about your refrigerator temperature control. Almost every refrigerator on the market is going to come with some sort of thermostat to help you control the temperature inside. This is a great feature, but the problem is that many of them are finicky and take some finessing to learn how to control. Experiment a bit with yours to make sure you learn its intricacies and know exactly how it responds.

4. Keep it full. This is a less commonly known idea, but the fact is that you will have a much easier time maintaining proper refrigerator temperature if you keep it as full as possible. The same is true for the freezer. That is because all that mass holds on to cold, which means your refrigerator will not need to work as hard to maintain temperature. If you have a large amount of empty space, add a few soda pop bottles filled with water to act as heat sinks.

5. Watch for leaks in the gasket. The door seal is one of the most important parts of the unit when it comes to maintaining the proper temperature. If there are any holes or gaps or spaces where it has torn or warped, your refrigerator will constantly be leaking cold air out into your kitchen. It will have to work ten times as hard to maintain the right temperature.

Tips & Warnings

• Bulb thermometers tend to be more accurate than dial thermometers.