frigidaire fgun2642le1 leak

[bruce.b]

FGUN2642 leaks water from under neath in the front.  Mostly towards the right side of the refrigerator.  It has no water hooked up to it right now.  The ice maker fill tube froze up and pushed itself all the way up and out of its hole.  There was a cylinder of ice the shape of the tube that it was attached to.  I think it froze up because my wife took things apart and had the panel that directs air behind the bottom shelf out of place .  I've ordered a new inlet valve, but in the meantime I'm wondering what is causing this water to leak and how to deal with it.  I'm kind of presuming that it is doing some sort of defrost cycle that causes some of the ice that must be inside the unit somewhere to melt and leak out of the drip pan.  Does this make any sense.  

[Hiroshi]

If this is a french door unit as the model# implies, you are probably having leakage typical of a defrost drain tube freeze-over. The defrost water has nowhere to drain when the tube is blocked, so it trickles down to the freezer floor and creeps like a glacier towards the door opening... Check for an ice trail on the floor of the freezer and if you see one:  Remove the back wall of the freezer and blast the ice away with a steamer until you can see the drain hole, then steam that drain hole until you see vapor pour out from under the unit. If you don't have a steamer, a turkey baster will suffice, but it will take longer and won't have any cool vapor or sound effects.

[bruce.b]

WOW!  My wife reported problems opening the freezer today, so I took a look a bit closer.  We'd had ice on the bottom of the freezer previously, I thought because of the icemaker having overfilled.  I shut things off and disassembled.  Apart from the door slides being frosted and difficult to move (this is the second set of slides in it), there was over an inch of ice on the rear bottom of the freezer that I removed.  I then removed the back panel of the freezer to find nearly an inch of ice on top of the aluminum panel atop the drain hole.  I removed at least a quart of water from the drain hole using a baster interspersed with application of steam.  yikes.  there must have been a lot of ice built up behind the shield as well.  I never did see steam coming out from the bottom of the unit, but I did eventually see a small drip of water from the hose I could see dangling into the drip pan.  I was using a wallpaper steamer, so I had kind of limited access into the hole.    I took several feet of a single strand of #12 copper and shoved it down into the drain hole to make sure it didn't appear blocked any more but I never got it to come out into the drain pan that I could see.

I'm thinking perhaps the freezer door seal is allowing air to infiltrate and additional moisture is being condensed....

[Hiroshi]

Turkey baster not available? I am doubting your gasket is the culprit, unless you can see a gap in it somewhere...