Mine didn't come with a strainer, but there was a kind of plastic stick in that hole which, I suppose, is both meant to obstruct anything bigger from going in there, and also you can push or pull the stick if something is stuck in the hole.

Anyway, I decided to take it away completely because if something got stuck in that stick itself, water wouldn't go inside the hole fast enough and spill on the bottom of the fridge, and from there to the floor. So I decided to leave that stick away for now and keep that hole open with even a bigger stick (=a plastic chopstick) once in a awhile.

But yeah, I guess the problem then is that some organic matter can end up in that water pan through the hole, and as it is quite hard to reach and clean in this model...

Hmm, I have a fridge which has about 4 years but I never checked for this :). But it doesn't smells, so it's probably ok :D

I guess the general idea is supposed to be you never need to check it. The water ends up in that pan somewhare at the back/bottom of your refrigerator, and the heat from the compressor below it evaporates that water away (and this helps also to cool the compressor down as it takes energy to heat and evaporate the water; simple physics, yay!).

I've seen some commenting that their water pan is usually completely dry, ie. the water evaporates faster than new comes from within the refrigerator. Maybe this depends both on the model, what you keep inside the fridge (my wife puts quite a lot of fresh vegetables there, maybe they cause more water to accumulate), how hot the compressor works etc.

With my earlier refrigerator, I never checked it either as the fridge was situated so that I would have had to pull it out completely in order to see at the back of it. But now that I can more easily check it in this new model, I guess I check it from time to time, at least so that it doesn't seem to be spilling over.

There is not much chance of it really spilling over though unless there was lots of water coming in constantly, as there seems to be two backups for the spill. If the pan is about to spill over, there is a small cap at one side which leads to yet another pan where all the excessive water would go, and even that has a backup pan on the side to which water would go if even that would spill over. I saw some dry stuff on the bottom of that third pan, so apparently at some point both of those first two pans have spilled over, ie. there has come quite a lot of water from within the fridge at some point, but then stopped.

Technology, bah...

Yay for it actually, I mean I remember having a fridge which had 15cm of ice in the freezer (no kidding). Also the current one has an active carbon filter so I don't even have to clean it that often as the fridge never smells ugly :D

Better freezers have these ways to prevent ice from forming which sounds great (apparently it simply dries up the air within the freezer, similarly like air conditioners dry up air?), but on the downside that also means that unless your stuff inside the freezer is completely sealed within plastic bags and such, they will also become dry over time. So the fish fingers you've had there for half a year might have become dry as wood.

Anyway, I bough a cheaper (but big, full size) freezer that doesn't have such space age anti-ice technology, so it does form quite a lot of ice over time, especially during summers when there is more moisture in the air. I am now waiting for colder temperatures (like -10 C at least) so that I could put all the frozen stuff on the balcony and melt the freezer. Too bad it has been too warm this winter so far, usually +2 degrees or more, at best around -2 C degrees. Not quite enough yet. And I don't have enough passive ice boxes or bags either, to put the stuff in them.

First world problems ahoy.

Quite much actually. My wife likes to make certain foods where he uses frozen goods like shrimps and what have you, and I tend to freeze rest of the dinner so I can eat it as lunch next day. It is not completely full but lots of stuff inside still (it is a full size, what it is 180cm high or so).

Earlier we had a "semi" where half of it was the fridge and half of it was freezer, and it was full all the time. I like it now that we have twice as much both fridge and freezer capacity, easier to just put something in either without having to rearrange everything or pack tightly.

Back when I was living alone, back then a smaller freezer or even just an ice box was enough. Frankly I hardly ever had any frozen food anyway, maybe if I sometime decided to buy some pack of ice cream. I think my freezer was usually empty back then, now it is different.

I know the pains of packing in the small freezers though... Luckily my wife is an expert there. But I have no room for an extra freezer.

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Maybe I'm just imagening things

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