I owned a $4500 Kitchenaid French door double drawer fridge that worked great for about 5 years then it just...stopped cooling. After a week of waiting for parts, I finally received the new control board ($125) and swapped them out. Crap. No change. (These forums boards online with dated advice are terrible!) So I phoned a friend who told me it may be the compressor if it's making a specific clicking sound on power up. Well it was doing just that, so I bought a new compressor ($380) on ebay and when it arrived...we'll, it was an oily mess because they didn't package it adequately and was just bouncing around in the box like a bowling ball. Luckily when I finally welded it in place, it worked!! ...unfortunately, there was a leak somewhere, so I had to add another 2 cans of r134a ($10 each) and after a day of the system equalizing, it worked again! Ice, cool air, frozen food...excellent. Unfortunately, there was still a leak somewhere. So what was the best thing to do at this point? I'm at over $550 in parts and plenty of frustration. I decided to call a certified Appliance technician for assistance and they told me it would be a minimum of $1200 to fix it. Ugh. It would have been easier to just pay someone out of the gate but I enjoy the challenge, so I did what any logical guy would do and got to work on it again! What I found is when I welded the copper lines back onto the new compressor, there was a pinhole leak. I was able to patch it with a spot weld and now it works great!! But I was without a refrigerator for almost 3 weeks. It was very hectic. What I learned is..."sometimes it's worth paying someone else to take on the frustration and other times, it's just satisfying to know you now know how to fix the fridge too!"🏆 What would you have done??!!