We have a Whirlpool refrigerator-freezer with built-in icemaker and ice and water dispenser. The data plate on this one indicates that it left the factory in October, 2005.
During the past several weeks, we have noticed at times that the ice dispenser struggles to deliver ice, in either cube or crushed form. When I look into the ice bin, I often see that several ice cubes (sometimes upwards of a dozen) have stuck together.
I’ve done a thorough check of the door seal and found no loss of integrity. The icemaker itself has no difficulty in producing cubes (although once in a great while, a single cube will stick to the fingers that push the cubes from the freezing tray to the ice bin; if this state of affairs continues, we can find ourselves dispensing all of the ice, and no more gets made until I knock the stuck piece away), but it is becoming less and less likely that I can reach into the bin and find MOSTLY discrete cubes.
Anybody have any idea what could be going on here? Thanks in advance.
From your info, looks like might be a leak freezing cubes together in bin? Really need more info - there’s a lot of
solutions out on the web if (for example) the ice tray is not filling completely. Good to check door integrity but if
nothing else is thawing in freezer compartment, probably not the culprit. You say “The icemaker itself has
no difficulty in producing cubes” - can you expand on this a bit?
It makes the ice cubes, it flips the ice cubes out of the freezing trays, at their normal size, it fills the freezing trays with water for the next batch.
Yes, the evidence seems to suggest that the ice is partially melting, and then refreezing, but I can’t for the life of me imagine how this might be happening. Could the entire freezer compartment be having intermittent periods of inactivity that I’m just not noticing
My next question is: How’s the rest of your food doing? Are you noticing anything else melting? Ice cream would probably be the first thing that you might notice. It could be that your defroster is either staying on too long or the evaporator fan is coming back on too soon after it finishes it’s defrost cycle. Between those two, I’d put my money the defrost cycle staying on too long.
Another thing could be that it’s just not cold enough in there so when you open the door moisture gets in and freezes the cubes together (do you have excess frost) or when it goes through defrost it’s coming up above freezing. It should be about 0 +/-5 degrees. That could actually happen from it not defrosting anymore or just having the temp setting bumped by accident.
I hate to be a Negative Nelly, but once our icemaker started to do this, it was a quick and steep slide to the junkyard for the whole refrigerator. I second the theory that it has to do with the defrost cycle; in our case, the cubes were coming out looking okay, but they were just suspiciously wet. After a while, we also started noticing crystals forming in the ice cream. Then the refrigerator compartment started getting too warm, and the whole thing went to hell.
Not a lot of help, I’m afraid, but I would like to add a word of thanks for using the word “discrete” correctly. It warms my heart.
Before the OP gets that far, if we do diagnose it as a bad defroster, defrosters on on fridges are typically super easy to swap out. It’s typically just a little timer. A few screws, some wires and you’re good to go.
ETA, assuming it’s just the timer and not the actual defroster.
Zaharie Shah, the pilot of the missing Malaysian airplane, has your back.
He doesn’t explain what the problem was with his ice-maker, but he took it out of the fridge and has it laid out on a table. It’s a Whirlpool, too, so who knows, you might get something out of it.
This afternoon, I tried to dispense some crushed ice (that has not been a problem for several weeks), and the motor, while it would energize, was unable to drive the screw that pushes the ice into the chopping blades. I opened the door to the storage bin, and found that it was full of ice. The product on the right was all in cubes, and on the left was a practically solid mass of ice. I couldn’t even pull the bin out.
So I removed the individual cubes by hand, and put them into a colander in the sink, then I wrestled the bin out of the freezer. I extracted the lump of ice, and returned the cubes to the bin. The lump of ice is about fourteen inches long, and maybe five inches by five inches in height and width. Fortunately, it left the drive screw undamaged when I removed it, so I’m able to dispense ice again.
It’s interesting to me that the ice on the right side of the bin does not appear to have undergone any melt-and-refreeze; all of the problematic ice is right on top of the driving screw, and right below the freezing tray.
We don’t have any ice cream in there (because no one in California will sell me a 64-ounce carton, so I don’t buy it), but all of the food that is in there is nice and frozen; there is no evidence that it is even partially defrosting. No frost build-up in the freezer,
If it helps, the model number of the fridge is: ED5VHGXMO10.
Thanks for all the suggestions to date, and for anything new that occurs to anyone.
Check the door seal on the left side of the door and make sure it’s good. You can visually take a look at it and just make sure there aren’t any gaps glaring at you, but the ‘real’ way is to close a dollar bill in the door and pull it out. It should offer some resistance. Work your way all the way around the door. Do the top as well.
This is a long shot…make sure the light is turning off. Open the door and, with it open, push the little button to make sure it turns off. If it does, unscrew it and leave it out for a few weeks just to make sure it’s ALWAYS off.
If it’s intermittently on when it shouldn’t be (I think it’s below the ice bin) it’s going to melt the ice and it would refreeze into a solid lump.
Someone owes me money if I’m right on that one.
Check the seal and flap that closes off the ice from the outside. When you press the lever to dispense ice, it should open a flap to the ice container. When you release it, the flap should close. If the flap is stuck or obstructed, the warm outside air will create a dispense iceberg just like you mentioned.
I suspect the problem is a water leak. Check the spout or tube that water travels down to get into the freezing tray. It may be dislodged or cracked, allowing water to drip onto your ice at every fill cycle. This at first stuck your cubes together when it froze. Now the leak is larger or unnoticed longer, forming a massive lump of ice. It won’t heal on its own, but can be either re-aligned or replaced.
I like all of these suggestion (including my two). You can check CannyDan’s by shutting off the water to the fridge for a few days and seeing if you still have the problem. Inconvenient, yes, but it’ll help solve the problem.
Reanimating this thread, because I’ve finally taken a positive action. At the end of May, I found some troubleshooting videos on youtube, and did a partial disassembly of the ice maker. When I gained access to the freezing tray, I saw mineral deposits on the bottom, suggesting that water was leaking from there. A closer inspection revealed that the freezing tray actually had a small crack in it, which was pretty much continuously drenching the cubes in the bin.
I found a part number and video instructions for replacing the tray/heater assembly, but life began intervening, and it seemed that I never had both time and cash on hand to get this job moving. Until this morning. Having bookmarked the page showing the part number and installation instructions, I picked up the phone and started calling appliance repair part depots in the area, and tried to find the assembly.
Turns out that the labor involved in rebuilding the ice maker from the ground up more than offsets the cost savings of buying this component instead of an entire ice maker, which is why none of the parts depots (which sell primarily to professional appliance technicians, after all) had it on hand. So I spent the extra twenty bucks on the new unit. Brought it home, yanked the old one, slapped the new one in, and had the job completed within about a half hour.
This was when I began to worry. Although I knew for a fact that everything electrical and plumbing-related was hooked up and turned on, the freezing tray stubbornly refused to fill with water. I would have thought that this should happen immediately.
Any service techs know why it SHOULDN’T fill immediately, and how long I should REALLY wait before I begin to worry about no ice being produced?
Give it an hour or two, it might be in the middle of a cycle so that it doesn’t call for water the very second you turn it on. People might want to be able to plug their fridge in, move it around, un-plug it, re-do something, plug it back in, move it around etc and do that all with out a bunch of water in the tray.
If there’s no ice being made within an hour or three, check your connections, make sure any lights are lit, see if it’s cycling, if there’s a feeler arm, make sure it’s down and make sure you turned the water back on at the valve.
Did you remember to turn it back on? There’s usually a switch someplace.
If it hasn’t filled within an hour of being turned on / powered up, it isn’t going to on it’s own.
Sometimes the water freezes in the feed line just upstream of where it enters the ice maker. I had one finicky on that pulled that trick whenever I was doing maintenance on it. If that happens, the valve may be opening & the ice moving mechanism is turning on its timer, but you still get no ice.
Latest update: approximately half an hour after my last post, I heard the water valve open to fill the freezing tray. Since then, the new ice maker has frozen and harvested three batches of cubes.
