Why has my ice maker stopped making ice?

What is actually going on

Small, hollow or only half formed says water is not reaching the mold in the volume it expects, and that traces back to an overdue filter, weak pressure at the inlet valve, or ice inside the fill tube. A machine producing nothing at all, while the freezer around it stays cold, has a harvest fault instead: the harvest module, its thermostat, or the motor that drives it. On the clear-ice machines common in Del Mar bar runs there is a third possibility, scale, because the water in this part of the county is hard and the mineral left on the evaporator plate slows the freeze until the cycle can no longer finish.

What we check, and in what order

Scale is the quiet one. A clear-ice machine works by freezing a thin layer at a time and rinsing the impurities away, which means every gallon it uses leaves a little mineral behind on the plate and in the reservoir. As that builds up the plate insulates itself, the freeze takes longer, the harvest turns sloppy, and the cubes come out cloudy at the edges and weld together in the bin. People read fused cubes as a temperature fault. Far more often it is a cleaning interval that quietly slipped.

The second check on a slow machine is the condenser, and on this coast that goes double. Undercounter machines breathe through a grille a few inches tall, and the outdoor bar units take salt directly instead of filtered through the marine layer. A partly blocked coil never stops production, it halves it, so the complaint is never that the machine broke. The complaint is that the bin no longer seems to fill. Clearing the coil and the drain resolves a good share of those without a part being fitted at all.

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

Questions

Frequently asked questions