Our refrigerator was set to 37 °F and sitting at 65. The freezer was at 0, exactly where it should be.
The refrigerator is a GE Café CYE23TSDSS, a counter-depth French door we bought in 2014 when we renovated the house. It uses what GE calls TwinChill: two evaporators, two fans, one variable-speed compressor and a 3-way valve. The two compartments do not share air. So the freezer holding 0 °F was not reassurance that the machine was healthy. It proved the compressor and the refrigerant charge were fine, and that the fault sat entirely in the fresh food circuit. That narrows the problem to a handful of parts.
The refrigerator keeps its own fault log, and it had already recorded what was wrong. GE service mode is entered by holding the Water, Crushed and Cubed pads until the screen offers it. From there, two-digit test numbers address individual components, and the fault log is test 00 00. Mine showed F106 sixty-two times in a single day.
F106 means the fresh food fan is not reporting back while it is supposed to be spinning. The board watches a tachometer signal on that motor, so a missing signal usually means a motor that has stopped. That fan is the only thing moving air from the evaporator into the compartment. With it stopped, the evaporator still got cold and had no way to deliver any of it.
Test 00 47 settles the question. It runs the fan at 75 percent and shows the speed. The service guide gives the healthy range as 1500 to 4100 RPM. Mine returned 0.
So the motor was dead, and the compressor, the charge, the damper and the thermistors were not. The part is WR60X26866, about $73 from AppliancePartsPros and $68 from GE’s own parts store. Amazon lists equivalents for $22 to $33, and those are the wrong buy. The control board needs the tachometer signal to confirm the fan is running, and the cheap clones omit it or report it badly. Fit one and the fault keeps counting, which looks exactly like a failed repair.
The swap is small work. The evaporator cover comes off, the motor unclips from the duct, the new one goes in. Forty-five minutes to an hour and a quarter the first time, and almost none of that is the screwdriver.
We got a free defrost out of the timing. I was in Utah that week, so the refrigerator sat unplugged with the doors propped open. A stopped fan starves the defrost cycle, which is how an evaporator ends up as a block of ice, and a few days off was the cheapest way to clear it.
What I expected to go wrong was the verification. The stored fault counts do not expire. Leave them and the machine still reports a broken refrigerator after a successful fix, so the log gets cleared first with test 00 01.
Then the readings. Test 00 47 came back at 3375 RPM. Test 00 48, the freezer fan, read 2324. That fan was never faulty, so a sensible number there shows the board reads tach feedback correctly, and that the 3375 on the repaired fan is a measurement rather than a stuck display. The condenser fan read 1616 inside its 1000 to 2100 RPM range.
The temperature followed. It is at 42 °F and still coming down toward 37.
A $73 part and an afternoon is the right answer for a twelve-year-old refrigerator, and that comes back to the freezer holding 0. Had both compartments gone warm, the compressor or the charge would have been in play, and at that age the arithmetic flips toward replacement.
If your refrigerator goes warm while the freezer still holds 0, run the fan test before you shop.