You notice it at night: the fridge just… never stops. The sides feel hot, the kitchen hums, the power bill creeps. A refrigerator running constantly isn't necessarily failing — it's failing to shed heat, and in the Treasure Valley there's a seasonal culprit with a name: cottonwood.
Where the heat is supposed to go
Everything a fridge pulls out of your food has to be dumped into the room through the condenser — coils on the back or, on most modern units, underneath, with a fan pulling air through them. Blanket those coils in dust and the whole system runs longer, hotter, harder to move the same heat. The compressor pays the overtime.
The Boise June special
Every year when the cottonwoods along the river corridor let go, that fluff finds its way into homes and gets inhaled by every condenser fan in the valley — it mats over coils like felt. Add pet hair and ordinary dust and a three-year-old fridge can be running with half its heat-shedding capacity. The fix costs nothing: unplug, pop the front toe grille (or pull the unit and open the rear access), and vacuum the coils with a brush attachment until you see metal again. Twice a year here; more with shedding pets.
The other suspects, in order
Condenser fan stalled or matted: down by the compressor — if it isn't spinning briskly during a cooling cycle, the whole system suffocates; motor replacement is a routine visit. Gasket leaks: warm, dry Idaho summer air sneaking past a tired door seal makes the fridge chase an invisible leak all day. Location physics: a fridge in a 100°F garage in July runs nearly continuously by design — that's the room, not a defect; a freezer in a sub-freezing garage in January has the opposite confusion. Defrost failure: a coil quietly turning into an ice block makes the machine run forever while cooling worse — the tell is frost creep and drifting temperatures alongside the marathon running.
Why not to ignore the marathon
Constant running is the compressor aging in fast-forward, and the compressor is the one part where the repair conversation gets expensive. A coil cleaning is free; a fan is modest; catching a defrost fault early is routine. We check in exactly that order — cheapest first, meter in hand, fixed quote before anything is replaced — and most of these calls end with a fridge that finally learns to be quiet again.
