Common fault
Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?
Short answer
Pull a handful of cubes out and look at them before anyone quotes you a part.
The reasoning behind that
Hollow, small or half-formed means the mold is not filling, and that traces back to filter age, low pressure at the inlet valve, or a fill tube that has partly frozen. Nothing at all, in a freezer that is otherwise cold, is a harvest fault instead: the module, its thermostat or its motor. 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 valve is the first reading we take, because it decides which of the two you are paying for.
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.
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.
Reviews
The freezer drawers under our bar in Bressi Ranch had started frosting at the edges and everything inside was one solid block. Condenser had never been cleaned since the house was built, apparently. He cleaned it, changed the seal, and the drawers have been fine since.
- ★★★★★
Cubes came out small and half hollow so I assumed the ice maker was done for. He measured the water pressure at the valve first, found the filter years past due and scale on the fill tube. The water here is hard on these machines. Full size cubes again without replacing the module.
- ★★★★★
Two other companies had been out and both said gasket. He looked at how the column was standing before he touched the rubber. Our kitchen is an old Olde Carlsbad remodel and the thing had been wedged into an opening built for something else. Sat it level, door pulls flat now.
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
My refrigerator is warm but the freezer is still frozen solid. Is the compressor gone?
Almost certainly not. A Sub-Zero built-in runs two separate sealed systems, one per compartment, with no air passing between them, so a hard-frozen freezer has already proved the refrigeration side works. What is left is the refrigerator circuit: its evaporator fan, a defrost failure furring that coil over, or a thermistor reporting out of range. Ordinary parts, normally a single visit.