Common fault
Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?
Short answer
Two different complaints arrive under this heading and they need opposite repairs. Cubes that come out small, hollow or half formed mean the mold never filled, and everything responsible for that sits upstream of the freezer.
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.
Reviews
Two other outfits had been out to the Thermador freezer column and both wanted to replace the board. He moved the door and watched whether the light and fan responded, and the switch had quit, so the thing never scheduled a defrost. The fridge column beside it was fine all along.
- ★★★★★
Ice from the bar machine had gone small and hollow and I assumed the maker was finished. He measured what was actually reaching the valve before naming a part: scale in the screen, plus a filter well past its life. Nobody had told me the water here was that hard.
- ★★★★★
The wine cabinet is built into the dining room millwork and the lower shelves had been drifting warm since spring. He left a probe down among the bottles instead of trusting the panel, and it was the fan in that zone. He also chased down a hum I'd learned to ignore.
Appliance down in San Diego?
Tell us the brand and what it is doing — we can usually name the likely repair before we arrive.