No idea, I'm afraid. Does the noise bother you? Do you want them to stop making it? If that's the case, then go upstairs while the noise is happening and ask them nicely to please stop making it. Or only do it earlier in the day, or whatever solution will work for you. "I don't know what you are doing, but that noise I mentioned last week? It's happening now. Could you please figure out what is causing it and stop it? Thank you." Bear in mind that in some apartment buildings, noise travels strangely. What seems to be directly overhead might actually be on one side, or upstairs and over one unit, something like that. But if you go up while the noise is happening, you will be able to hear if it is coming from that unit or not. Or you could just live with it. Once I had upstairs neighbors who apparently dropped a bowling ball on their living room floor every night about 10 pm. Big thud of something falling, followed by a rolling noise. I never did figure out what it was, but it wasn't annoying enough to bother with trying to get it stopped.

We have the GE Profile - CDFD. It was ridiculously loud and I had the service guy out 3 times. !#$#@ - they kept sending the same guy and after the last time I refused to let him back in my home. He even scratched the new wood floor...but that is another issue. Anyways, after calling and calling the place we got it - they did speak with the GE rep and replaced the fridge with a new one. Ends up at swapping time they found the first one did have a leak and was thus causing the loud noise. Our new one is fine. The energy efficient ones are "louder" than others but we were amazed with the plane-like sound the faulty one had. We called our kitchen the tarmac because it felt as if we were going to take off. Keep hounding GE... they should def. do something.

poolboyz...did it sound like this??? (I hope this works!) Mine started doing the same thing when the weather got a little cooler. Pentair says it's the bearings in the motor. Fortunately, mine is only 6 months old and they are sending me another. But I thought I'd see if this would help in pinning down your problem. Here is a link that might be useful: pool pump

I agree that 17 years is a good long life for a fridge, and that your electric bills will drop like a ROCK if you got a new Energy Star fridge. It's also likely to be a lot quieter, and your frozen food will keep its quality better if the temperature is not constantly cycling. We had to buy a new fridge when we moved into this house in '04 because there were mice nests IN the coils and compressor area and the stench inside the fridge was unreal - I don't know how the OPs could stand keeping food in there! I bought a really nice Kenmore (made by Frigidaire) fridge, basic as basic can get except for the "upgrade" to glass shelves, for only $499 at Sears. I don't like icemakers and suchlike, IMO it's one more d@mned thing to break and cost me pots of money in repairman bills not to mention leaking water all over Creation (can you tell I've had such gadgetry go kaput before?), not to mention it takes up a good chunk of freezer space and I always need every cubic inch of that. It's a great fridge, very quiet, keeps its temperature, doesn't slurp electricity in vast amounts. I don't personally like having the freezer on the bottom, we use a good bit of frozen stuff (esp. in winter when we eat the largesse of people's gardens that I froze for later) and so I prefer having it up on eye level so I can see what's on hand before it gets freezerburnt, and getting down there to rummage around just doesn't do it for my creaky bones. So, your mileage may vary depending on how you use you fridge. (If there was one bell-and-whistle that I could have "a la carte" it would be pullout shelves, those are awfully nice.) I wouldn't go stainless just on the basis of a trash can, no way nohow... SS can be kind of a pain in the patoot to take care of (fingerprint city, and matching across and sometimes even within brands can be a nightmare, for instance, there are complaints on Epinions that Frigidaire's "Easy Care" stainless does NOT match other Frigidaire SS appliances well so you're kind of locked into buying only the "Easy Care" line), you have to really want it bad. You can accessorize with SS quite easily and choose appliances that take less fuss to keep looking nice. Do you have a good stove or is that on its way out too along with the dishwasher? If your stove is good enough that you expect to get a decade or so out of it, and you're cool with the color then by all means get the almond although it may not be easy to match it exactly. But if you'd rather have white get white even if it doesn't match the other things right now; we put up with a white fridge and almond-and-black stove and black-and-white dishwasher for 3 years because we knew we wanted to replace the stove (which I just got for Solstice, yay!) with white. DH just said in a couple of months we'll get a new white range hood to match, double yay. :-) I'm crossing my fingers for the 14yo dishwasher to hold out another year, at which time it'll be replaced with all-white and finally everything will match. :-) It's a process but eventually we'll have all things we're really happy with. Another thought, if you want to go white with the appliances, I haven't done it myself but people have repainted stoves with high heat enamel spray paint, which is available in many colors in auto parts stores catering to the hot-rod crowd - the range of colors is much bigger than you get in hardware stores and it'll stand up to the heat of car engines. Prep would be the most time-consuming part: clean all surfaces with a greasecutting cleaner and rinse well, then sand all surfaces thoroughly to remove the gloss, wipe thoroughly with microfiber "tack cloth" (regular ones leave a residue), then prime and paint per the directions from the paint company. If you didn't want to DIY, auto-body shops repaint appliances too, although you'd have to pull them out and schlep them over. There are also housecall appliance refinishers, but IIRC they don't do stoves on-site, although it's worth asking - look for "appliance refinishing" in the yellow pages. That would be much cheaper than replacing even with the cheapest appliances, and buy you time to research the dishwasher and stove while waiting for them to kick the bucket. ;-) I hope your cramps get better soon. Got a heating pad? If you don't, fill an old sock (no holes) with rice and microwave it for a minute or two until it's hot, and cuddle up with that, a good book and a cup of tea.