Fixing broken Haier HRF-336SS fridge

Recently my five-year-old Haier HRF-336SS refrigerator suddenly broke down. It stopped cooling, there was a clicking noise coming from the back and the light inside the fridge was flickering. I disconnected the fridge from power, plugged it back and now it was also making a beeping sound every 5 seconds, and a red "alarm" notification appeared on the LCD panel.

The clicking noise was coming from behind of this panel, so I removed it:

There were two PCB boards behind the panel:

The clicking noise was coming specifically from a blue relay on the white PCB. I didn't immediately see any signs of a burned component or other malfunction, so I thought that perhaps the blue clicking relay was broken. I called Haier support and they scheduled a technician to come and check the fridge. The technician finally came over two days later, and after checking the fridge, he informed that they don't sell this model of the fridge anymore, and they don't have spare parts required to fix it. The recommendation from the technician was to buy a new fridge.

I wasn't happy with this, as the lifespan of a typical fridge should be at least 14 years, and it should be possible to repair what looked like some issue with electronics. Hence, I decided to try to fix it myself.

I removed the white PCB to check for any signs of broken electronics. Upon close inspection, I noticed one bulged capacitor:

No other issue with the white PCB was visible and the green PCB also looked perfectly fine. Hence, I simply replaced the bulged capacitor with a new one. Here's the same PCB after this quick fix:

I connected everything back together and turned on the fridge. Surprisingly, it worked perfectly fine. A simple replacement of a single broken capacitor was all that what was required to fix the fridge. There's one less fridge in the landfills, hopefully for another few years.

Perhaps don't listen to the tech support when they tell you to replace broken electronics. Try to fix it first.

Update: 1 month later the fridge still works fine.

ID: Perbaikan kulkas Haier HRF-336SS.