Month: September 2021

How to KEEP your Samsung Fridge after lots of frustration … 2 years without water or ice buildup! … Samsung refrigerators are pieces of shit! (part 2 of 3)

UPDATE: Ice is building up at the back of the fridge again. Water hasn’t it my crispers yet, but it’s probably time to start cleaning up soon. So, Samsung refrigerators are STILL pieces of shit!

After a couple of nightmares with my Samsung RF18HFENBSP fridge, I’m happy to say that I’ve not had an issue for over 2 years now. My friend has the RF197ACRS with the exact same problem. Hopefully this fix covers his issue as well. I’ll update this post if there’s any different results, but I don’t expect him to have any issues using the same remedies for at least 6-9 months.

Here’s what I did to correct (fix) it.

  1. Buy a bigger Samsung drain evaporator. This one should help. I think what’s happening is that the original evaporator is too small and unsatisfactory in keeping the condensation warm enough to avoid freezing. If you’re ready to do the repair and don’t have this thing, you can try using a large paperclip or a metal wire. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KFG9NO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
  2. Eat whatever you can and try to cut down to only be using an ice box for all of your items. You should remove everything from the fridge. The way I did it was just before I went on vacation, I ate all I could to an empty fridge. I fixed the fridge immediately when I got back to an empty fridge, conserving the power while I was on vacation. It should take less than a day for all of the ice to melt out if you leave it all open. There’s a lot of insulation, so if you leave it closed, it’ll take a lot longer. Open the fridge door and pull the plug to let the fridge thaw out. Leave some towels on the floor by the fridge and inside the fridge where you will find the puddles so that you don’t have water all over the place. You can find plenty of videos online on how to remove the panels. Here’s one:
  3. To install the drain evaporator, I just used a pair of pliers and made sure that the clamps were bent enough to touch the wire. Nothing special. After you’re done installing the new drain evaporator, just close everything back up.
  4. Consider adjusting the temperature and keeping it a little warmer. For a little while, I had mine at 4 and 40. I found it might be a little warm, so I put it back to 2 and 38, but my friend said that if you keep it warmer, it won’t freeze. At 4 degrees, the ice cream comes out soft. I think it’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, the boss of the house doesn’t like it that way.

Hope this helps you!

Not all SD card readers are alike!

If you asked me a year ago what SD card reader to get, I probably would’ve said to just get whichever one works. Well, clearly, I was wrong!

I’m obviously not a hardcore photographer/videographer or professional multimedia editor or anything like that!

I tried out a handful of readers that I’ve had over the years. Here are the readers ranked from slowest to fastest. Probably from oldest to newest also.

This one I’ve had probably for over 10 years. These were like $2 or something back then. I think I either got it on eBay or some discount website. They were for convenience for me – back then, sometimes, I used these as USB sticks.

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 058f:6335 Alcor Micro Corp. SD/MMC Card Reader

Image result for sd card reader

This one came with one of my cameras or something. It was probably a cheap camera that recorded to microSD. It’s not terribly slow, but not reliable. Maybe it was the Linux driver, but there were many times when I couldn’t write the entire microSD card before it just hung. Pulling it out and remounting corrected this, but was done almost every other time when writing an entire sd card.

Bus 001 Device 025: ID aaaa:8816 MXT microSD CardReader

Image result for sd card reader


This one came with my Raspberry Pi. It’s also not terribly slow, but not fantastic. What I like about it is that it supports both, USB-A and USB-C.

Bus 001 Device 024: ID 14cd:1212 Super Top microSD card reader (SY-T18)

Here’s the speed of an internal microSD card on a 2021 Dell Inspiron 5502/5509. Pretty disappointing speed!

Also crap, this was something like $30 – pretty expensive, but elegantly fits on the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, not very reliable. When plugging in too many things, you could get very annoying, random disconnects.

Bus 001 Device 029: ID 05e3:0749 Genesys Logic, Inc. SD Card Reader and Writer

This one turned out to be the fastest one I had. The speed is below, using an adapter from USB-c to USB-A, it still ran pretty fast.

128177930240 bytes (128 GB, 119 GiB) copied, 4157.25 s, 30.8 MB/s