A couple of weeks ago the ice maker in our freezer quit working. After watching a couple of fix-it videos on YouTube, I took it out and found it was clogged with ice. So I let the ice melt and put it back in. Afterwards, it was cycling but never filled up with water.
One of the YouTube videos showed how you could connect a couple of jumpers to check that the water was flowing. I did that, and heard it filling up, so I knew the problem wasn’t anything like a clogged water line.
Apparently the most common failure in an ice maker is that the heating element goes out. There’s an element on the bottom that melts the ice enough that the little plastic fingers can scoop it out into the tray. My assumption was that the heating element was dead and that there was some circuit that prevented the ice maker from filling up when that happened.
So I ordered a replacement ice maker on Amazon and it arrived yesterday. After dinner last night I swapped in the new ice maker and… nothing. It didn’t appear to be filling, cycling, anything. I checked it again about 15 and 30 minutes later but it still didn’t seem to be doing anything. I told my wife that I guess I was going to have to call a repairman after all.
Then, about an hour later, while we were watching TV, I heard a “klunk” noise from the kitchen. It was ice falling into the empty ice bin! So I guess it was working after all, I just wasn’t being patient enough.