Frigidaire Side-by-Side Repair in Buena Park: Loud Clicking from the Back
The Call from a Neighborhood Off Beach Boulevard
I rolled up to a home in a quiet cul-de-sac off Beach Boulevard mid-afternoon. The customer was a working dad who’d taken the afternoon off because his Frigidaire side-by-side had started doing something alarming. Every few minutes the unit made a loud clicking noise from the back — three sharp clicks in quick succession, then silence for a couple minutes, then three clicks again. The fridge compartment was warming, freezer was holding for now but slowly losing ground.
He was worried it was the compressor about to fail and didn’t want to be sitting on a fridge full of food at 9 p.m. with no one able to come out. So he found us and we got him on the schedule for that afternoon.
What the Clicking Pattern Tells You
Three rapid clicks repeating every minute or two from the back of a refrigerator is the diagnostic signature of a failing start relay. The compressor on a residential fridge needs a start relay to kick its motor windings into rotation — once the compressor is spinning, the relay drops out and the run windings carry it. When the relay fails, the compressor tries to start, fails, the relay clicks open, the compressor’s overload protector trips, and a few minutes later the cycle repeats.
You can hear it as a loud click because the relay is electromechanical and the click is the contacts opening and closing under load.
Frigidaire side-by-sides — the FRS, FFHS, and LFSS chassis — use a PTC (positive temperature coefficient) start relay mounted on the side of the compressor at the back of the unit. The relay is a sealed plastic module about the size of a deck of playing cards. When the PTC element inside fails, the start sequence either won’t initiate at all or will trip out after a few seconds — which is what produces the clicking.
I asked him how long the symptom had been going on. About 36 hours, he said. He’d hoped it would go away. It doesn’t.
The Diagnostic and Fix
I pulled the unit forward and removed the lower rear access panel. The start relay was right there on the side of the compressor housing, plugged onto two terminals coming out of the compressor. I unplugged the relay carefully — Frigidaire mounts these on a friction fit, and the trick is to pull straight back without twisting — and shook it next to my ear. The PTC element rattled. That’s a dead giveaway: a healthy PTC is a solid ceramic disc, and a rattling one means the element has cracked internally.
I had a compatible replacement relay on the truck. Snapped the new one onto the compressor terminals, made sure the overload protector clip was seated against the side of the compressor too, and put the rear panel back together.
Powered the unit. The compressor kicked on immediately, smooth startup, no clicking. I let it run for 20 minutes and watched the freezer temperature start to drop from where it had drifted up to. The customer’s fridge was on its way back. I texted him the next morning to confirm — both compartments were back at setpoint and the clicking was gone.
Total job time about 45 minutes including the diagnostic. Standard 3-month parts-and-labor warranty. Start relay is one of the cheapest, fastest repairs in the refrigeration trade.
When to Suspect the Start Relay Versus the Compressor
The clicking-every-few-minutes pattern is the relay signal. If the compressor itself is failing, you’ll usually hear it differently: a low buzz that lasts 10 to 15 seconds and then drops out, or a single loud thump followed by silence. A failing compressor often gets hot to the touch on the dome and the overload protector trips repeatedly.
If you catch the clicking early — within a day or two — and replace the relay, the compressor itself is usually fine. The compressor was failing to start because the relay was bad, not because the compressor had a problem. But if you leave it running for weeks with the relay clicking, the repeated start attempts under load can eventually damage the motor windings and turn a $200 repair into a compressor replacement that costs ten times that.
Don’t ignore the clicking. It’s the cheapest and fastest fridge repair there is — if you call early.
If you’re anywhere in Buena Park, La Mirada, or Cypress and need refrigerator service, we cover the whole city seven days a week. We handle Frigidaire refrigerator service on the FRS, FFHS, and Professional series. $65 flat diagnostic, waived with repair, 3-month parts-and-labor warranty.