Why is there water under my refrigerator?

What is actually going on

Clean water at the front, appearing when the ice maker runs, usually means the supply line or a fitting at the inlet valve. Cloudy water, paired with a sheet of ice across the bottom of the freezer, means the defrost drain has frozen shut and the melt is backing up inside the cabinet until it spills at the door. In Del Mar the second is the more common of the two and it is the one that ruins a floor, because the water goes into the cabinet base and the subfloor long before it shows at the front.

What we check, and in what order

Coastal humidity makes the drain the hard-working part in this climate. Every defrost cycle produces melt water that has to run down a small tube to a pan under the unit, and in humid air there is simply more of it to move. Add a drain tube that has partly iced, or a drain heater that has failed, and the water backs up into the bottom of the cabinet, freezes into the sheet people find under the bottom drawer, and then overflows the front lip. The fix is clearing the line and correcting whatever froze it. The delay is what costs money.

You can narrow it down yourself before we arrive. Water that appears on a schedule, roughly every few hours, is defrost related. Water that appears when the ice maker fills or when someone uses the dispenser is a supply-side fault. Clear water is supply. Slightly cloudy water, sometimes with a little debris in it, has been sitting in the cabinet. And if you can safely reach the shutoff behind or beneath the unit, closing it stops a supply-side leak immediately without harming the refrigeration 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