Ice makers and water lines in Point Loma

Ice complaints are usually water complaints in disguise. Cubes that come out light, crescent-shaped or with a crater in the top are telling you the mold was still filling when the cycle moved on, and the causes are a filter nobody has dated, pressure at the inlet valve that has fallen away, or ice narrowing the fill tube to a straw. San Diego water is hard, and in the older parts of Point Loma the line running to the refrigerator was added long after the house was plumbed. Fit a new ice maker to a supply like that and the next tray comes out looking exactly like the last one.

What this covers in Point Loma

Covered here: the ice maker inside a refrigerator, standalone and undercounter ice machines, and the whole water route feeding them. Pressure gets read at the valve early in the visit, because that one number sorts the job into one of two piles before any part is discussed. Then filter age, the fill tube, and the fill tube heater on models that carry one. If the water side is clean we move to the harvest side: module, mold thermostat, ejector motor. Mold in the bin, a sour taste and water where it should not be belong to this job too, since all three usually trace back to the same line and the same forgotten filter.

• Light, crescent-shaped or cratered cubes: a fill fault, and no new ice maker will cure it
• Empty bin while the cabinet is still hard-frozen: module, mold thermostat or ejector motor
• Inlet valve furred with scale, weeping past its seat, or stuck part open
• Fill tube frozen down to a straw, or a fill tube heater that has quit
• Pressure falling off along a supply run retrofitted into an older house
• Cloudy ice, mold in the bin, or cubes that have taken on the smell of the freezer
• Undercounter and outdoor machines: condenser cleaning, drain service and descaling

The supply run is where the older housing stock bites. Houses in Loma Portal and the Wooded Area were plumbed decades before anyone thought to run water to a refrigerator, so the feed is nearly always an afterthought: small-bore line teed in wherever was convenient, taken a long way round, sometimes through a valve that has not been turned since it went in. That works until scale narrows it. The machine then fills a little short on every cycle, the control has no way of detecting it, and the bin fills with cubes that look right until you pick one up and it caves in. Reading pressure at the valve takes two minutes and decides which repair you are actually buying, which is why it happens before anything gets quoted.

OEM parts, or an authorized supplier when the factory part is unavailable, and one price agreed before the work starts. Call (858) 375-1585 and tell us what the appliance is doing.