Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?

Why we start there

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. If the compartment is still cold and no ice is arriving at all, the fault has moved to the harvest side — 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.

What happens next

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