DEFROST HEATER

Remove cover over cooling unit and defrost heater. 9 Philips screws. Remove defrost heater by unplugging both ends and opening the metal holders at bottom of cooling unit. Then use pliers to pull out Styrofoam blocks. Wires at ends of heater will be free, but may have to be coaxed out of the cooling unit ends. Replace the heating element by reversing the process above. The hard part of this job was figuring out why the GFI kept blowing whenever the freezer went into its defrost cycle. I finally had to remove and test independently the defrost heater to fined the short. The test was done with a multi function ohm meter with one lead on the defrost heater power wire and the other lead on the casing of the heater. I slid the meter lead along the casing to find where the short was and determined that it was very close to the end of the heater that was connected to the neutral side of the incoming power. Thus only the GFI would blow, not the main circuit breaker.