Two things are happening at once and they need separating. There is the appliance question, which is fixable in some cases and a service call in others, and there is the food question, which has a number attached to it and does not wait.
Deal with the number first. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service guidance is that the refrigerator should be at 40 °F or below and the freezer at 0 °F or below, and it advises keeping an appliance thermometer in both so you can tell where you actually are. If you do not own one, that is the first thing to buy, and it costs very little.
This page names no repair that involves opening a sealed system, and it does not tell you to bypass anything. Where the checks run out, that is the point where it stops being yours.
Before anything: get a real reading
Put a thermometer in a glass of water in the middle of the fridge and leave it for several hours. Not against the back wall, not in the door. A glass of water gives you the temperature of something with mass in it, which is closer to the temperature your food is actually holding.
Read the freezer separately. They fail differently and a fridge that is warm while the freezer is fine points somewhere quite specific.
Write the number down with the time. If you end up calling a technician, that reading is the most useful thing you can give them.
USDA's own guidance is that you should never taste food to determine its safety. The thermometer is how you find out instead.
The checks, in order, cheapest first
Work down this list and stop when you find something. Doing them out of order is how people spend money on a part that was not the problem.
1. Is it plugged in and is the socket live
Obvious and worth thirty seconds. Try the socket with something else. A fridge on a circuit with a tripped breaker or a failed outlet is a common and free fix.
2. When did it start
A gradual decline over weeks points to a different set of causes from a sudden failure overnight. Write down which one you have; a technician will ask.
3. Is the door actually closing
Put a sheet of paper across the seal and close the door on it. Pull. If it slides out with no resistance, the seal is not gripping at that point. Go around the whole door.
Look at the seal itself for tears, hardened sections and gaps at the corners. Check the door is not being held open by a shelf, a bottle or a drawer that has shifted.
A door left ajar even slightly does two things: it lets warm, humid air in continuously, and it makes the compressor run constantly without ever catching up.
4. Is anything blocking the airflow
Most modern refrigerators cool the fresh food compartment with air moved from the freezer through vents.
Find the vents. They are usually at the back of the freezer and at the top or back of the fridge compartment.
Move anything that is against them. A box pushed against a vent, a stack of containers, or a full freezer packed to the ceiling can stop the air moving into the fridge entirely.
Look for frost build-up over the vents, which is a symptom rather than the cause and is worth reporting.
5. Has the temperature control been moved
Check the dial or the panel setting. Fridges get bumped, cleaned around, and adjusted by other people in the house. If the setting is wrong, set it correctly and give it a full day before judging.
What the dial does is not always what people think it does, and on many units one control affects both compartments. That is worth its own explanation rather than a line here.
6. Is it in a hot spot, or has the room changed
A refrigerator rejects heat into the room. A unit in a garage, a conservatory, next to an oven, or in direct sun in summer is working against the room.
Check the clearances. Manufacturers specify a gap at the back and sides and it is in the manual. A fridge pushed hard against a wall, or into a cabinet recess that is tighter than the spec, cannot get rid of its heat.
7. Is the condenser dirty, and does yours even need cleaning
This is the step every article on the internet puts first, and it is the one with the most nuance.
Whirlpool's own product help states that routine condenser coil cleaning is not typically needed in a normal home, and that some models cannot be owner-cleaned at all. That is the manufacturer of the appliance disagreeing with the advice industry that grew up around it.
So the honest instruction is: check your own model's manual before you do this. If yours calls for it and the coils are accessible, the work itself, and the unplug-it-first rule that goes with it, is set out in how to clean refrigerator coils.
8. Can you hear the compressor and the fans
Stand quietly beside it.
A fridge that is completely silent and warm is a different fault from one that is running constantly. A fridge running non-stop and not getting cold is a different fault again. Clicking on and off every few minutes is a third pattern.
You are not diagnosing from this. You are collecting the observation a technician will ask for.
Where this stops being yours
Anything involving the sealed system stops here. The refrigerant circuit, the compressor and the coils inside the walls of the appliance are not homeowner territory, and in the United States handling refrigerant is regulated work. Nothing on this page tells you to open, tap, top up or bypass any part of it.
Anything behind a fixed panel that needs tools to remove stops here on most units, and always after the appliance is unplugged.
A burning smell, a scorched socket or a plug that is hot to the touch stops everything. Unplug it if you can do that safely and do not use it again until an electrician or a qualified appliance technician has looked at it.
And if the reading is above 40 °F and you cannot get it down, the food question is now the urgent one, not the repair.
The food question, separately
USDA's guidance is that the refrigerator should be at 40 °F or below. If a thermometer says it has been above that, the question of what is still safe is not something to judge by look or smell.
USDA is explicit that you should never taste food to determine its safety, and its refrigerator and freezer figures are the numbers to work from rather than an estimate. What to do after a period without cooling deserves its own page rather than a paragraph, and it is the next row in this cluster.
Is it worth repairing at all
If the checks above run out and it needs a technician, the question becomes whether to repair or replace, and that is a genuinely open one rather than a foregone conclusion.
The rule of thumb everybody quotes, that you replace when a repair costs more than half the price of a new one, is widely attributed and we could not verify it at a primary source. Our triage guide reports that failed trace rather than repeating the rule as though it were published: is this a DIY fix or a service call.
FAQ
What temperature should my refrigerator be? USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service guidance is 40 °F or below for the refrigerator and 0 °F or below for the freezer, and it recommends keeping an appliance thermometer in both.
My fridge is warm but the freezer is fine. What does that mean? That pattern points at the air path between the two compartments rather than at the cooling system as a whole, which is why blocked vents and frost over the vents are on the checklist. Note it and tell the technician if it gets that far.
Should I clean the coils first? Check your own manual first. Whirlpool's own product help says routine condenser coil cleaning is not typically needed in a normal home and that some models cannot be owner-cleaned at all, which is the opposite of what most articles assume.
How long can I leave food in a fridge that is not cold? This page will not give you a figure for a partially working fridge, because none is published for that case. What is published is USDA's guidance for a fridge with no power at all, and its instruction never to taste food to determine its safety.
The fridge runs constantly. Is that the problem or a symptom? It is an observation, and a useful one. Constant running with poor cooling, silence with poor cooling, and short cycling are three different patterns. Collect which one you have rather than acting on it.
Can I add refrigerant myself? No. Nothing on this page involves the sealed system, and handling refrigerant is regulated work in the United States. That is a qualified technician's job.
Sources: USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service and FoodSafety.gov guidance on refrigeration and food safety during a power outage, read 2026-08-28, for the 40 °F refrigerator and 0 °F freezer figures, the recommendation to keep an appliance thermometer in both, and the instruction never to taste food to determine its safety. Our fetcher received an HTTP 403 from fsis.usda.gov and foodsafety.gov on that date, so those figures are reported from the agencies' own indexed guidance rather than from a page we opened directly, and are labeled as such; that is our retrieval failing rather than anything on the agencies' side, and a writer with working access should replace this note with a direct read. Whirlpool product help on condenser coil cleaning, as cited and dated in our own refrigerator coils article on this site. No cost, repair price, lifespan or refrigerant figure appears anywhere on this page.
