Common fault
Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?
Short answer
Look at the cubes before anyone quotes you a part. Undersized, hollow or half-formed means water is not arriving in the quantity the mold expects, which traces back to an overdue filter, low supply pressure at the inlet valve, or a fill tube that has partly frozen. Nothing at all, in a compartment that is still cold, is the harvest side instead: the module, its thermostat or its motor. Those are opposite repairs, and fitting a new module to a starved water line produces exactly the same hollow cubes as the one it replaced. We gauge the inlet first.
San Diego water is hard, and an ice maker is a machine whose entire job is freezing that water cleanly and releasing it from a mold. Scale accumulates in the water circuit and on the mold surface, and the symptoms arrive in a predictable order that you can read yourself: cubes turn cloudy, then they get smaller, then they stop releasing cleanly and start fusing into a block in the storage bin. A filter left in past its life speeds up every stage of that. When we service an ice maker in La Jolla we tell you the real state of the filter and the scale, because a module replacement on a scaled circuit is money spent on the wrong component.
The outdoor machines are their own case, and there are a lot of them here. Terrace bars and outdoor kitchens along the ocean-facing streets and up on the view terraces run undercounter ice machines that breathe salt air through a small grille and reject heat into a warm enclosure. Production falls off gradually, and the owner puts it down to the machine not keeping up with a party. What has actually happened is that the condenser is loaded and partly corroded, the freeze cycle takes longer than it should, and every subsequent cycle is a little worse. On an outdoor unit anywhere in La Jolla, the condenser is the first thing we look at and the last thing anybody else does.
If that matches what your appliance is doing, say so when you call — it tells us which parts to bring, and most of these are finished in one visit.
Reviews
Our Sub-Zero freezer went out on a Sunday. They answered immediately and had a technician at our home in Bird Rock within two hours. Incredibly professional and fast service!
- ★★★★★
The technician who fixed our wine cooler was so knowledgeable. He explained the problem clearly and gave us a fair price. Excellent service for our home near La Jolla Shores.
- ★★★★★
Finally, a repair service that operates 24/7 as advertised. They were able to come late in the evening to fix our refrigerator in the Muirlands area. Lifesavers!
Appliance down in La Jolla?
Tell us the brand and what it is doing — we can usually name the likely repair before we arrive.