This morning I came out to the kitchen and noticed the clock on the stove blinking but the light inside is on. Hmm. Did the power go out? (Later I learned out that yes, it had).
We have a refrigerator with ice and water dispensed through the left side of French doors. Bottom=freezer drawer. Both have ice makers, but the dispenser is fed by the ice maker in the top (fridge).
I went to get some cubes and got water. Maybe Mrs. L got some water, ok, because it’s usually set for cubes. Switched to cubes, got a few, opened door. BEEP BEEP BEEP! Some error code (S4, I think, which doesn’t appear when googling). I frantically pushed buttons so as not to wake the house. Got it turned off…geez! I put breakfast in microwave and suddenly the fridge just starts dispensing water. I managed to get that shut off. Maybe ten minutes later I heard thunks. A couple ice cubes fell out and landed on the floor.
WTF? I hate to think what might have happened if the water self-dispensed for hours while we’d been at work. It has rarely dropped an unasked for ice cube. I think it makes them, drops them through a chute, and they can get stuck. That puts them “outside” the fridge’s cold air, and they melt a bit. That makes them smaller, so they drop.
We deal with a lot insurance claims due to leaky fridges. Often it is a failure of the supply line or its connections, but sometimes it is due to an internal part such as a bad valve. Sometimes ice makers get jammed and that can lead to trouble. I would shut off the supply to the fridge and get an appliance tech out.
What brand (or make/model) is your fridge?
The water thing is odd. However, between the power going out, the error code and the water self dispensing (ignoring the ice thing), I’d maybe try unplugging it and plugging it back in to see if resetting it helps. If it continues to be a problem, the power outage (or maybe there was also a surge) possibly fried the motherboard.
It could possibly also be the solenoid valve. While those should generally fail in the closed position, you never know.
If rebooting it doesn’t work, find the valve that turns off the water supply to the fridge. That will buy you time to fix it while not depriving you of a cold place for your food.
We haven’t had another hiccup since that incident happened and we used the fridge a lot yesterday (company over for dinner, which we collaborated on). Mrs. L says we did have a power surge (I guess Nextdoor said so). It’s also showing that the air filter and water filter need replacing. When we’ve replaced them in the past, it has gone a few weeks or a month and then it tells us they need replacing.
The ice cube maker in the freezer was a real saga. It stopped working and we had the extended warranty. A guy came out and pulled out the drawer and we removed everything. He climbed in, fixed it. Later it stopped working and we had this rotation going where they’d send a guy who would say it was the switch, so they’d schedule to come back and fix it. When that (different) guy came back he’d say, nah, it wasn’t that, it needs a new ice maker. Which they had to order. When that came in a (third) guy would come out, look at it, and say wait, this needs a switch. They’d reschedule and a (fourth) guy would say whoa this needs a nice ice maker. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Sears actually tried to get us to extend our extended warranty and we said “You’ve had five tries on this…you want us to pay you again so we can give you five more?”
If “S4” could have been SY or 5Y, I’m thinking you’re okay. From what I’m finding SY is a problem with the evaporator fan. If you can still hear the fans (the ones inside) acting like they always did, I assume, turning on when you close the door, turning off when you open it, that’s fine. 5Y is a communications problem on power up. If the front panel is working normally and everything else is working normally, whatever it is, it seems like it’s okay now.
And, now that I’m thinking about it. I wonder if it was doing some diagnostics and that’s why it turned the water on and off and maybe it opened and closed the ice door.
Something else I just thought of, but it’s a long shot. If something fried, it could create a short between the ice maker solenoid and the water dispenser solenoid such that sending power to one, sends power to both. I’m only thinking that since before you got water, you accidentally got a few ice cubes which could have brought the ice cube level down enough to call for it to make more.
If the cubes in the ice maker are frozen, you could try dispensing enough of them so that it cycles again and see if it happens again.
SY…I think that’s right. The fridge display currently shows it at its pre-event temperature settings (34F fridge, -4F freezer) and all seems well.
I use the ice a lot more than Mrs. L, so the fact that it was switched was a little odd. Perhaps after a surge/outage, that’s where it defaults on restart.