We came home a little cockeyed one night this past winter. My memory has it about midnight, but that probably means it was like 8:45pm. I was ready for bed, but of course, fate was not in our favor that night. There was a weird sound coming from the kitchen. Like a hissing. It took a while to track down, but fortunately, we noticed a bit of water under the fridge, and that was it. The fridge had blown a hose, literally split an old dried-up hose, and was pushing pressurized water through the split making the hiss.

We poked at the problem for a minute, and of course managed to entirely detach the hose making the problem five times worse, as the water was now rather gushing. We knew that like a toilet or a sink, there was probably a shut-off valve. But where? The fridge was literally bolted into place and I’d never had the occasion to learn to move it, so that was out. Maybe that was a known issue so the valve was under the sink? Nope. Under the crawl space weird area where our HVAC and water heater are? Nope, but, that area is close to under the fridge, and that’s where all the water was going. Huge sloppy mess of water. At least it was going down there and not flooding the house.

Our next thought was to shut off the water to the house. The main valve, as it were. But… I also didn’t know where that was. It’s never come up and I’ve never noticed it. So we’re in panic mode now, and I manage to find the phone number to the city’s emergency plumbing hotline, which is totally a thing that exists, and a nice fella talked me through some options, and offered to come out. But at the same time, Miranda had an epiphany that the previous house owners left us a packet of information on the house, and it might be in there. Low and behold, a computer-paper-printout of where the house water value is. Found, turned off, immediate crisis over.

Next day-ish, we get an appliance plumber out to deal with it so we can turn the water back on. There indeed is a water valve behind the fridge, but no way we could have gotten to it whilte in the moment. It essentially required special knowledge and equipment to move the fridge. Anyway, he essentially rips out the water features of the fridge for now, and maybe we’ll reschedule a time to repair all that. But we knew it was time for a new fridge anyway.

Hence, the 800 Bosch Series French Door Bottom Mount Refrigerator. Miranda picked it out. I think it’s pretty classy looking, check out how it’s like partially reflective:

I like the cool middle drink drawer thing:

There is no “front” water/ice thing, which I think gives it a classy look. Instead, the water spigot is inside the fridge, giving off the impression the water is extra cold (to my silly brain). And the ice maker just dumps ice into a drawer in the freezer below. Which I kinda like because it means you can quickly scoop out what you need, not press a button, wait for the weird gurgling noises an ice dispenser normally makes, then half a third of it fall and ground anyway.

It’s also a “smart” fridge, meaning it’s connected to WiFi and doing god knows what. It doesn’t try to tell you that you need milk though, basically, it just shoots you an alert when the door is ajar. That happened today and it saved us from a few hours of an open fridge, so worth it so far.

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