Oh boy! We're going to have to come up with $1,000 or more for a new refrigerator.
I noticed that the back of the freezer was covered with frost. Had never been that way before so looked at a few on line videos and decided the defrost part of the cycle wasn't working. I found the defrost timer and rotated it into defrost mode thinking that if the timer motor was bad it wouldn't come out of it. About an hour later I heard the compressor start. OK! not a bad timer. We used a hair dryer to thaw out some of the frost and removed the back panel from the freezer side like they did in one video. Took about two hours to thaw out the cooling coil. It was a solid block of ice. Found the defrost element and defrost termination thermostat as described in the video. Was going to use an ohm meter to check for continuity of the termination thermostat and noticed the burned out spot on the defrost heater. Easily found the correct replacement part by just entering the refrigerator model number. Defrost heater kit from AppliancePartsPros.com included the termination switch. Sweet! Part came on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and had the heater installed in about an hour. I had run the refrigerator for the three days waiting for part to arrive but it hadn't frozen the coil too much. Ice cream was as hard as a rock last night. Had to turn the controls up a little. Very satisfied and only cost me about $60.00 shipping included! Wife thinks I'm a hunk. (I always knew that!)