How to Replace Refrigerator Door Gaskets ?

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How to Replace Refrigerator Door Gaskets ? A faulty or leaking refrigerator door wastes energy, increases your energy bill, and stresses your refrigerator, shortening its life. You also risk spoiling your food. Changing the door seal (often called a gasket) may be necessary, but it’s not that difficult of a process.

Refrigerator Door Gaskets Replacement

What You Need to Replace Your Refrigerator Gasket

  1. New Gasket – Hopefully this is an original replacement part from the maker of your unit. Otherwise, it’ll likely have to be a universal refrigerator/freezer seal.
  2. Hex Head Wrench – This will likely be a 1/4″ size hex head but you may need a screwdriver or “Allen” wrench depending on your refrigerator.
  3. Rag – This is a good time to clean under the gasket where it has likely never been cleaned.
  4. Vaseline – Or other petroleum jelly type product (optional).

Step-by-Step Refrigerator Gasket Replacement

How to Replace Refrigerator Door Gaskets ? Now that you have your new gasket, let’s get started with our replacement. I suggest you open up your new gasket and lay it on the floor in a warm area so that it “relaxes”. This will just make for easier installation as it’s likely somewhat misshapen from being in packaging. If need be, you can even use a blow dryer to help relax the material. I don’t think this will be necessary but it is possible. Don’t get it too hot, just warm enough to help it relax.

Loosen Gasket Screws

The screws that hold the gasket in place are visible after lifting up on the gasket.  Lift the front edge of the gasket at one corner to expose the screws that you’ll need to loosen. The key word here is loosen. We are not going to remove the screws entirely.

Loosen the screws working from one corner across and down. As you loosen the screws, you will be able to start pulling the gasket off of the door. Work your way around in this fashion until the gasket is completely off.

Loosely Install New Gasket

Install the new gasket loosely for now, so that we can make minor adjustments later. Begin to install the gasket in reverse of how the old one was removed. As you install the new gasket, just slightly tighten down the screws as you go.

Test and Adjust as Needed

If there is a very minor gap on the door side of the gasket, this is more acceptable than where the gasket seals up against the cabinet itself. That seal must be flush all around the door.

Now that the new gasket is essentially in place, shut the door and inspect the gasket on all sides to ensure that it is properly seated. We don’t want any wrinkles in our new gasket. You can make minor adjustments by pulling the gasket gently one way or the other as needed.

Tighten All Screws

Now that the refrigerator (or freezer’s) gasket it positioned correctly, finish securing it by tightening all the screws.

Finally, now that your gasket is seated properly and you are happy with your inspection, tighten down the screws one last time to complete the replacement. Be careful not to move the gasket while you are doing this, you don’t want to knock it out of adjustment. Also, do not over tighten the screws. You should just snug them down firmly as opposed to breaking out the drill to really wrench them down.

(Optional) Apply a Light Coating of Petroleum Jelly

A slight smear of Vaseline on your refrigerator gasket at the jamb might make it a bit easier to open the doors.

You may need to smear a light coating of petroleum jelly (Vaseline) along the gasket at the jamb to ease the opening of the door if your seal is amazingly tight. You should notice a little more effort is required but you shouldn’t have to brace yourself for leverage to open it either. That’s it. We’re done and likely within a half an hour of the time we started. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now we can just reap the benefits of our improved refrigerator.

What are the benefits of a new gasket? I thought you’d never ask.

The Benefits of Installing a New Refrigerator/Freezer Gasket

I know that the cost of the gasket is not outrageous but can still be hard to swallow. Perhaps this will make you feel better.

A refrigerator runs in order to maintain the interior temperature of the cabinets. This is also when the refrigerator costs you money, when it’s running. With that in mind, a leak makes it difficult to for the appliance to maintain it’s temperature and therefore it runs more often. Are you feeling better yet? It won’t be too terribly long before that new gasket pays for itself.

That’s not the only benefit though. Rising and falling temperatures inside the refrigerator are not good for your food. Now that yours is properly sealed, you should expect your food to stay fresher longer due to having a consistent temperature to “chill” in.

Last but not least, how about the fact that you just cleaned an area of your fridge that has likely never been touched? If your gasket was bad, it’s likely that this area was quite dirty and even moldy as well. I don’t know about you but I prefer my food to be as far from mold as possible.

All this and there were no service charges, no special tools to buy, and no sweat. You should feel good about having done this yourself and perhaps saved the cost of buying a new refrigerator when the one you had just needed a little love.

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