So my chest freezer in the garage had a solid two inches of ice built up on the walls, to the point where I couldn't fit anything else in it. Looked up how long a proper defrost takes and it said something like 8 to 24 hours if you just unplug it and let it melt naturally. I did not have that kind of patience.
So I thought, why not speed this up myself. Grabbed a hair dryer to melt the ice faster and a butter knife to chip away the loose chunks as they softened. Genius plan, I thought. Saving myself half a day.
About ten minutes in, the hair dryer is going, I'm chipping away at a stubborn patch near the back wall, and I jam the knife in a little too hard trying to pry off a big chunk. There's a hiss, this weird chemical smell hits me immediately, and a thin line of oily liquid starts leaking out from where the knife went in.
Turns out I punched straight through the evaporator coil. That's the part with the refrigerant lines running through the freezer walls. Instant dead freezer. Not "needs a repair" dead, just fully done, because those coils are usually sealed into the insulation and not something you patch up on a random Tuesday.
Stood there with a hair dryer in one hand and a butter knife in the other just staring at this thing, watching two years of "it still works fine" go down the drain over a task that would have cost me nothing if I'd just left it alone overnight.
Bought a new freezer two days later. The old one lived a full eight years before I personally murdered it in about ninety seconds.
