Why is my refrigerator not cooling but the freezer works?

This symptom is genuinely useful, because it rules a lot out. If the freezer is still cold, the compressor runs, the refrigerant is doing its job, and the sealed system is fine. The problem is downstream of all that — it is about getting cold air from where it is made to where it is missing.

How these fridges actually work

In most modern refrigerators there is exactly one cooling coil, and it lives in the freezer. A small fan — the evaporator fan — blows air across that coil and ducts some of it into the fresh-food compartment. The fridge does not make its own cold; it borrows the freezer’s. Break that airflow and you get precisely this symptom.

Work through these in order

• Open the freezer and listen. A running fan is audible. Silence, with the compressor humming, points straight at a failed evaporator fan motor.
• Pull the back panel inside the freezer. A coil buried in a solid block of frost means the defrost system has failed — the coil ices over and air can no longer pass through it.
• Check the vents between freezer and fridge for a bag of frozen peas parked directly in front of them. This is a real and common cause.
• Check that neither compartment is overpacked. Air has to circulate; a wall-to-wall fridge does not cool evenly.
• Check the door seals. Run a hand around the gasket for escaping cold, and look for tears or a gasket that no longer sits flush.

The frost clue is the useful one

If you find that iced-over coil, the underlying fault is in the defrost cycle — a heater, thermostat, or control board that should be melting frost periodically and is not. You can thaw it manually by unplugging the fridge for several hours with the doors open, and it will work again for a while. But it will re-freeze, and the repeat is the diagnosis: a fridge that needs manual defrosting every few weeks needs its defrost system repaired.

When to call someone

Fan motors and defrost components are common, well-documented repairs on most models, and a tech visit is usually well under the cost of a new fridge. The calculus changes if the unit is past about 12 years — at that point a significant repair is worth weighing against replacement.

In the meantime, move anything genuinely perishable to a cooler. A fridge sitting above 40°F is not safe for food storage, however long it takes to get fixed.