Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?

What is actually going on

Filter age comes first, then the pressure arriving at the inlet valve, then scale narrowing the valve screen, then a fill tube that has iced part of the way along. No ice at all, inside a compartment that is still perfectly cold, means the harvest cycle is not running, which points at the module, its thermostat or the ejector motor. A gauge goes on the valve before any part gets named, because a module bolted onto a supply that is short of water will hand you the identical light, hollow cube a week later, at the cost of a part you did not need.

What we check, and in what order

There are two kinds of ice maker in these kitchens and they fail in different places. The one built into the freezer of a built-in shares the cabinet's air and its defrost, so its faults tend to be the fill tube, the inlet valve and the harvest module. A standalone undercounter machine in a bar run, an island or an outdoor kitchen is a small refrigeration system in its own right, with its own condenser, its own drain and often a drain pump, and it loses production to a dirty coil long before anything electrical goes wrong. Tell us which one you have and roughly where it sits, because the parts are not the same and neither is the visit. In Coronado, Point Loma, La Jolla, Del Mar and Encinitas a bar run or an outdoor machine is ordinary rather than unusual, and out toward Rancho Santa Fe, Fallbrook and Valley Center the outdoor one can sit a long way from the kitchen the call was made about.

Water is the local variable here, and it is hard across this county. The parts that suffer are the ones with the smallest openings: the inlet valve screen, the fill tube, and the seat the solenoid closes against. Scale narrows all three, the mold fills short, and the cubes come out light and hollow. Then the valve stops seating cleanly and weeps a little after each fill, and that weep is what ices the fill tube shut overnight, which is how a machine making poor ice turns into a machine making none. Filter age and measured pressure at the valve come before any conversation about a module.

If that matches what yours is doing, say so when you call — it decides which parts come on the van.

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