What I was pointed to in a bunch of reddit comments was that there are actually nice devices on the market, in the commercial/industrial segment. I will for sure look into that when I need to replace an appliance in the future.

I recently helped a friend to fix kinda newish freezer (5-8year old). The controler board had faulty capacitors so it was rather easy to fix it. Just take the board out, desolder the caps and put new ones. Easy. The price of the board itself is about 30% of the price of the whole fridge. But the surprising part related to your question was the fact that it took about 24h for the fridge to get to the nominal 4C temperature inside the cooler unit. That blowed my mind as I remember old fridges which could get chilly inside in about 20-40 minutes. I think the fan there is because the evaporator is tiny (saved materials) and cant cool down the full volume of the fridge without forced air circulation. So basically they save a bit of copper on evaporator and compensate it with the fan. Thats my theory.

I don't really know what the fan is for either, most freezers that I have seen don't have one. You could be right that they put the bare minimum in for cooling and the fan is there to kind of "help it along". If anybody reads this who designs these things, feel free to enlighten us :D

I've since figured out the little circuit and repaired the fan. I was wrong about 3 things in the video, 1) its not a shaded pole motor, but rather a single phase induction motor and 2) its not a thermal fuse on the pcb, but rather its a 50ohm power resistor and 3) its not actually the resistor that failed but the PCB itself. The motor is interesting in that its a single phase induction motor which is commutated by the little IC (a schmitt trigger) together with a rotor position sensor, which is a bit unconventional. Now I have no idea why they would choose to use this configuration rather than a cheap shaded pole motor, which is a perfect application for fans (low starting torque). Perhaps there are some thermal limitations. Anyways, I have replaced the power resistor and resoldered on the PCB and the circuit runs perfectly fine, fan works. I think the failure mode was ice or water ingress which shorted the leads of the resistor, causing a high current to flow and therefore overloaded the little PCB traces.

You are totally right man. I was think about exactly this as I was editing.

Dang dude did you just wake up mad and ready to argue lol? He's just expressing his input or opinion on the matter...no need to bash the guy in the video if you don't agree :/. Its a pretty well made video (in my opinion) in which he just goes on about the repairability of the fridge as well as other conjecture that ties in with his base argument. Feel free to make your own opinions/arguments but I generally don't think insulting anyone's genuine input will make a positive impact on the overlying argument. Positive criticism can go a long way.

@@95LUCKgold I don't disagree with what the guy said but you'll have to forgive me when I say that it's old business to complain that many products are no longer designed for repair. Pretty much every take-apart-and-look youtube channel (ie, AvE) mentions everything Ivanov said but also have some knowledge on the appliance to lend to the viewer. This vid just comes across as vague fist-shaking and complaining.

I'm not sure what you wanted to say with this comment, am I wrong for trying to create some discussion/attention about this issue? Its not an engineering breakdown of the fridge, I didn't want the main message to get muddled by going into deep technical discussion which 90% of the people who watch this wont care about. I will likely create a second video about the little fan, which I have since figured out how it worked and fixed and in fact the circuit and function is kind of interesting. If you want more technical stuff wait for that video :)

Thanks Lucio!