The Three Numbers Inside Your Liebherr, and Why We Ask for All of Them

Where it is

Liebherr refrigerator model number location, in one sentence: inside the cabinet, on the left-hand side.

Inside the appliance, on the left-hand side.

Open the door and look at the left-hand wall of the cabinet, usually near the top. On most models nothing needs to be removed — a shelf at most.

Not on the back, not behind the plinth, not on the door.

What is on it

Three numbers, and the maker asks for all three:

Type Designation — what the appliance is.

Service Number — which production version it is. Two cabinets with the same Type Designation and different Service Numbers can take different parts.

Appliance / Serial Number — the individual unit, and when it was built.

Most people, asked for "the model number", photograph whichever one looks most like a model number. That is usually the Type Designation, and on its own it is the least conclusive of the three.

Why all three shorten a visit

Built-in refrigeration is the worst case for identification. The appliance is behind your own cabinet front, so it does not look like anything from outside; the visible interior of two different generations can be near-identical; and the part that has failed is frequently generation-specific.

With all three numbers, the right part is identified before anybody arrives. Without them, it is identified on the visit, ordered afterwards, and fitted on a second visit — which is a week and another appointment.

Take the photograph now

While nothing is wrong.

It takes ten seconds, it lives in your phone, and the moment you need it will be the moment you least want to be crouched in front of a warm cabinet with a torch.

Do it for every Liebherr in the house. On a Side-by-Side pair that is two plates, because those are two separate appliances — and the number we need is the one from the half that stopped.

What to send with it

Alongside the three numbers:

• anything showing in the display, written down exactly, before it is cleared;
• whether the appliance is paneled with your own cabinet front;
• what changed, and when — a drift over a month and a stop overnight are rarely the same problem.

Those five things are the difference between a diagnostic visit and a repair visit.

The number people leave out, and what it decides

Of the three, the Service Number is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that most often decides whether the right part arrives. Two cabinets can sit behind identical fronts, carry the same model designation and take different components, because the production version changed partway through the line's life. The model tells us what the appliance is; the Service Number tells us which one of it you have.

The Serial Number does a second job that is worth money to you rather than to us: it dates the cabinet, and the date is what decides whether the maker's own five-year sealed-system position and its sixth-to-twelfth-year parts position still apply. That is worth establishing before anybody quotes a sealed-system repair, and it is a question you can answer yourself in the time it takes to open the door.

If the plate is unreadable — and in a kitchen that has been steam-cleaned a few times, it happens — say so when you book rather than guessing at a model from the shape of the appliance. There are other ways to identify it, and a guessed model is worse than none.