The short answer
A Aviva ARTM cabinet that runs and stays warm is telling you that the cold is either not being made or not getting to the load, and on this family those two possibilities are separated in the first two minutes. Heat leaves at the condenser behind or beneath the cabinet, close enough to the floor that carpet and dust matter.
What you observe on these models
- The cabinet is warm and the machine is plainly running — A unit that is working and never arriving is the presentation this page is about, and it is not the same fault as a cabinet that is silent.
- It runs continuously and never settles — On a compact top-mount refrigerator a cycle that never ends means the machine has lost either its heat path or its air path — it has not lost its will to cool.
- The cabinet recovers overnight and drifts by day — That pattern points at the room rather than the machine, and it is the single most useful thing an owner can notice.
- NEAR MISS — the cabinet is silent and nothing is cold — That is a power, start-relay or control fault rather than a cooling fault, and it belongs on a different page.
Causes, most likely first on ARTM
- The door and its seal — A glass or gasketed door that no longer pulls up tight lets room air in continuously, and the machine answers by running without ever arriving. On a top-mount the upper door is the one that matters, because everything below it is fed from that compartment. First on this family. On a top-mount refrigerator the path this fault travels is shorter and more exposed than the generic advice assumes.
- A dirty or obstructed condenser — The condenser is where the heat leaves. Once it is blanketed in dust or fed its own warm exhaust, the circuit cannot reject heat and the cabinet warms no matter how long the compressor runs.
- A stalled defrost cycle — Defrost stops before it fails outright: ice builds slowly across the evaporator, airflow closes down week by week, and the owner notices the warmth long before the ice.
- The set point, the sensor or the control board — A sensor reading the wrong temperature, or a set point someone changed, produces a machine that is behaving correctly against the wrong target. Last on this list, and the item that every cause above it can imitate exactly.
Check in this order, and why that order
- Start at the heat path: check the upper compartment first: on this layout it is the source, and a fault above always reads as a fault below — The freezer rear panel from inside the upper compartment, and the base bay from behind with the cabinet drawn forward. This comes first on this family because it costs nothing, needs no tools and rules out the most common cause in one look.
- Check the door on its seal, all the way round — Close it on a strip of paper at several points and pull. A strip that slides freely anywhere tells you where the room is getting in.
- Only then consider the sealed system — By this point four cheaper causes are eliminated. A circuit that is genuinely short of refrigerant runs constantly, rejects little heat and often shows a frost pattern on only part of the coil.
Before you open anything
Safety
Unplug the appliance or switch off its breaker before removing any panel. A capacitor can hold a charge after the power is off.
Models this page covers — the ARTM family
Reference| Model number | Family key |
|---|---|
| ARTM142** | aviva:refrigerator:artm |
When to call a technician
Call when the upper compartment is cold, the vent between compartments is clear, and the lower space still will not hold temperature. Call immediately if you can smell burning, if the machine trips protection repeatedly, or if there is oil rather than water in the machine bay — oil outside the tubing means the circuit is open, and every hour it runs after that costs more to put right. A note on scope: this page is written for the ARTM top-mount refrigerator and for the one model number the variant table names. A sibling family from the same brand will have a different order.
Other problems covered for the ARTM family
Lead Appliance Repair Technician · 12 years experience
Experienced technician with 12 years specializing in washing machine and dryer repairs across all major brands.
