how often to "force defrost" while waiting on new jazz board

[bingo]

I have an Amana ABD2233DES refrigerator with a bottom mount freezer. Fridge compartment was warm, compressor was running and the damper was open no air was coming in. Fridge had some ice on the center-rear of its floor (like where the cold air should have been coming up from the freezer compartment. Freezer had a lot of ice frost buildup on coils. 
Thanks to the videos I discovered the tech sheet and put it into service test mode. Defrost Thermostat was S" for open. I observed the damper door opening and closing.

I put it into forced defrost mode. Compressor shut off and the defroster heating rod came on. There was so much ice I had to go through about 7-8 forced defrosts and I used a heat gun to melt. 

I have ordered a new jazz board. My question is: While I am waiting for my board I need to continue to use the fridge and I'd rather not have to throw away any more food!  My plan is just to force defrost at least 1x per day. But then I realized that I have no idea if that will be enough! I guess I never really noticed/paid attention to the defrost cycles before so how do I know if the defrost cycle is continuing to fail to initiate on its own? About how often does a fridge operating properly, defrost?

If I find that there is a bunch of frost buildup and/or the fridge isn't keeping cool - can someone point me to the way to do a longer/deeper forced defrost?

Is doing manual forced defrosts until my board shows up in a week a wise strategy?

thanks all, 
Steve

[Samurai Appliance Repair Man]

If you really want to be sure you're starting off with a frost-free evaporator, you'll need to disassemble the freezer and clear the coil with a steamer then re-assemble. Here a couple videos that may help:

and another here: 

[evaappliance]

If your sure it is completely defrosted , every two days will be fine?

[PghMike]

I just had this problem, and I found that doing a regular "short" forced defrost mode once a week was sufficient to keep my fridge working.

Actually, we had to leave town for nearly two weeks, and I did a double forced defrost mode two days in a row, and the the fridge stayed cold for the whole two weeks.  It probably helped that there was no one home to open the freezer compartment during that time.

 

[DurhamAppliance]

8 hours ago, PghMike said:

 It probably helped that there was no one home to open the freezer compartment during that time.

 

Certainly,  door openings are counted as part of the algorithm in determining length and frequency of the defrost cycle.  However,  in this instance,  once a day or every other day should suffice but only after removing existing frost as Samurai advises.