Common fault
Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?
Short answer
Look at the cubes before anyone quotes a part. Hollow or half-formed means the mold is not filling: filter age, low supply pressure, or a partly frozen fill tube. Say so when you call Carlsbad Sub-Zero Specialists on (858) 779-0698.
The reasoning behind that
No ice at all, in a freezer that is still cold, is a harvest fault — the module, its thermostat or its motor.
How the diagnosis goes
What we check, in order: cube shape and the fill level left in the mold; the filter's age and whether flow has dropped off; supply pressure measured at the inlet valve; the fill tube, for ice and for the scale hard water leaves behind; and only then the harvest module, its thermostat and its motor. On undercounter and clear-ice machines the condenser joins that list near the top, because output halves long before anything else looks wrong.
Those are two different repairs, and a new module fitted to a starved water line hands back the same hollow cubes as the one it replaced. Supply pressure at the inlet valve is the first reading we take, because it decides which of the two you are paying for. Bar and outdoor ice machines are common in these houses and they fail differently from the one inside the refrigerator. On a patio near the water the condenser takes salt air straight off the breeze and loads up in a fraction of the time an indoor unit would take. Inland, on a west-facing patio in La Costa or Bressi Ranch, it is the afternoon heat that pushes the machine past what it can reject. Either way it keeps running and simply makes less ice, which is why this one usually gets reported months after it started.
If that matches what yours is doing, say so when you call — it decides which parts come on the van.
Appliance down in Carlsbad?
Tell us the brand and what it is doing — we can usually name the likely repair before we arrive.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How often does a condenser need cleaning in a house near the beach?
More often than the three-to-six-month interval we give owners generally, and how much more depends on the address. A refrigerator west of the freeway in Olde Carlsbad pulls salt-laden air through a close-packed fin pack every hour it runs. We set the interval from what the coil looks like on the first visit. Call Carlsbad Sub-Zero Specialists on (858) 779-0698 and ask.
Will you have to pull the refrigerator out of the cabinetry to work on it?
No. Built-in refrigeration is serviced in place. On a Classic combination cabinet the machine compartment sits behind the grille above the doors; on Designer columns, undercounter units and wine cabinets it is behind the base grille. Either way the work happens at the front, which matters on the Olde Carlsbad retrofits. Call Carlsbad Sub-Zero Specialists on (858) 779-0698 and ask.