Kitchen Large Electric Appliances - Amana refrig not cooling

Got home yesterday to find the Amana side by side refrig freezer, model sc22jw, p1104030ww, not cooling: frozen stuff thawed, ice melted.

This happened about three months ago- at that time I cleared the dust off the coils underneath and everything seemed fine, although items in the refrig froze after I cleaned it. I'm planning to do the dust clearing thing again, although I doubt enough dust has collected in just three months to shut it down. My wife told me that the refrigerator froze the lettuce again just recently.

A web search suggests this may be the "cold control" ("If your refrigerator freezes its contents, even when the cold control is set to its lowest setting, the cold control is probably defective. Call an appliance repairperson.") but I haven't been able to find any parts by that name. Is this likely to be the cause? Is this a DIY fix?

Thanks,
Dave O

Need to know if your compressor runs along with the freezer and hot coil fan, as they should.

And if they run, for how long? And does the compressor come on, when the compressor is no more than warm to the touch, if you turn the tmep control to max cooling?

If your fridge is not running, and it is warm inside it, make sure outlet is live and light is on inside the fridge. If that is in order, then if the compressor does not come on, you could manually advance the defrost timer to see if it comes on then.

Is this an older manual type unit, or a newer type unit that might have a control board inside it?

Same thing happened to my parents' Amana last year. Those things can get pretty dusty underneath, and in their case - since they prob didn't clean it as freq as they should have - it ended up being too expensive to repair.

Is the fan inside the fridge running? Next, look at the back of the fridge. Take off the cover and see if the fan underneath is running. Then see if the compressor is hot, warm or cool. If nothing underneath is runing, bypass the cold control and see what happens. Also advance the defrost timeclock a little.

I had cleaned the coils underneath the fridge on another occasion. This time it turned out to be the defrost timer gone bad: the back wall of the freezer had frost on it, meaning the coils inside the panel in back of the freezer (it's a side by side) were frosted over.

I thawed it, and changed the defrost timer, and had a happy ending. Not right away, of course, because in checking contiuity across the defost heater element I didn't seat the blade connectors properly, and had to figure out why. But still a happy ending.

Thanks for your replies!