Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Ahh, Grasshopper, your haiku has earned you special attention.

First, since you described testing the switches, I cleverly deduce that yours is a Whirlpool old-style icemaker. Several suspects to check here. The water valve ain't one of 'em because if it was bad, you wouldn't even have gotten your eight measly cubes. But, it's not a bad idea to test the water valve coil just to cover all the bases.

Make sure the white, plastic timing gear in the front of the control head isn't missing any teeth and that it's making full contact with the driver pinion throughout the full rotation.

Next, the water valve switch inside the icemaker control head can be a squirrelly bugger and is famous for deceiving even seasoned technicians. It can test good when it's near room temperature but then go flakey as it starts to chill down to freezer temps. The other common troublemaker is the thermostat. It, too, can behave in a flakey manner similar to the water valve switch. Determining with certainty that one of these components is bad can be tricky. Fortunately, they're both very inexpensive so you won't be out a lot of shekels if you replace both of 'em.

Even new, replacement icemaker kits aren't terribly expensive. If you don't feel like tinkering with an old icemaker, you can buy a new icemaker kit here.

Awwite, let's go make some chill pills!

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