What Is the Door Gasket and When Does It Need Replacing?

Where it sits

Round the whole perimeter of the door, on the door itself rather than on the cabinet. The visible face is a soft flexible moulding; inside it runs a magnetic strip, which is what you feel tugging when the door comes within a few millimetres of the frame. On a two-door cabinet each door carries its own, and a drawer carries a version of the same thing along three sides and the front edge.

It is held in a channel round the inner panel of the door, which is why the work never needs the cabinet moved: the seal comes off the door, with the door standing open and the unit exactly where the kitchen put it.

How it fails

By stiffening, not by tearing. A new moulding squashes flat where the frame is slightly irregular and springs back when the door opens. An old one stops doing both. It pushes the door away instead of drawing it in, and it stops taking up the small differences round a frame that was never perfectly flat to begin with.

The result is a gap you cannot see. Warm room air gets in continuously, the compressor runs longer than it should to pay for it, and on the freezer side the moisture that comes with that air turns into frost on the coldest surface it can reach. Two other signs show up first: a door that eases back open a moment after you close it, and a corner of the moulding that looks stretched, because a corner is the one place the section has to bend two ways at once.

The paper test settles it. Shut the door on a strip of paper and pull. Where it drags, the seal is working; where it slides straight out, it is not.

What replacing it involves

A new moulding, fitted with the door open, seated all the way round and then checked closed rather than admired open. Getting it square is the whole job — a seal pressed home in a hurry looks perfect and leaves a soft inch at one corner, which is the same fault you started with. On a panel-ready door the custom front usually stays where it is, since the channel is reached from inside the door.

Two things get checked at the same time, because a gasket is often the symptom rather than the cause: whether the door is still hanging level, and whether it still closes itself from a hand’s width open. Fitting a new seal to a door that has dropped simply wears the new one out in the same place.