4 ms·

Ice makers are notoriously flimsy. Serious race to the bottom by the manufacturers. The good news is that they're easy to replace (undo a couple of bolts and un

Ice makers are notoriously flimsy. Serious race to the bottom by the manufacturers. The good news is that they're easy to replace (undo a couple of bolts and unplug a cable and they usually come right out), bad news is the replacements are ridiculously expensive, like $100 each and come with all of the same design flaws the original had. There is also surprisingly little standardization which makes the replacements even more expensive as there are hundreds of mostly but not quite compatible models to stock and you have to be very careful when ordering replacements.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I have never heard about anyone having trouble with an ice maker until I read this. My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.
- jandrese 5y ago
  You have old ones from before the manufacturers stopped caring. It seems like ones made in the past 5 years have gone precipitously downhill, especially the GE ones.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  The Icemaker in my Frigidaire refrigerator has never worked since I bought the house, the problem is that the coils keep freezing over (the icemaker is in the refrigerator compartment so has its own freezer coil to make it cold) I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.
Spivak 5y ago
The thing that gets me is that for commercial operations it seems to be a solved problem. They break and require maintenance like anything else but if they’re not outright broken they are super reliable where fridge ice dispensers even when they’re working suck.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Standalone ice machines in particular infuriates me as 90% of the machines on Amazon are copies of the same broken design: it rotates a plastic water container by firing a motor on one side only for a number of seconds without any sensor to stop it. As a result, if you use them heavily, it reliably develops stress fractures after a year or so. It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw... It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Most were up to a few years ago, but the big players went out of their way to make dependable ice makers--I thought. The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers. I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator. The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  Unofortunately some manufacturers are now implementing DRM to control your use of the ice maker function. See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-ridiculous-refrigerator-drm https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801
- yardie 5y ago
  10 years is actually quite good for major appliances. If you're warrantied for 3 and manage to get 10 years out if it you've exceeded the design parameters. Environmentally, replacing a broken fridge is usually the only time someone will even research something more energy efficient.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Meanwhile my Grandmother still uses her fridge from the 60s. It still has the kind of handles where you can get locked inside and almost die if you are on a very special episode of any 80's kid show.
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    Wow. So the idea is that we want them to wear out more quickly so that they buy a new product that's more energy efficient? That strikes me as terribly wasteful. What about the impacts of a discarded appliance?
    - curryst 5y ago
      The compressor is almost certainly the most expensive part of the fridge. It's also one of 2 moving parts on fridge (the other the being the fan, which is cheap), making it the most likely to fail. I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight. I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money. So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I have never heard about anyone having trouble with an ice maker until I read this. My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.

jandrese 5y ago
You have old ones from before the manufacturers stopped caring. It seems like ones made in the past 5 years have gone precipitously downhill, especially the GE ones.
Johnny555 5y ago
The Icemaker in my Frigidaire refrigerator has never worked since I bought the house, the problem is that the coils keep freezing over (the icemaker is in the refrigerator compartment so has its own freezer coil to make it cold) I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.

Spivak 5y ago

The thing that gets me is that for commercial operations it seems to be a solved problem. They break and require maintenance like anything else but if they’re not outright broken they are super reliable where fridge ice dispensers even when they’re working suck.

vidarh 5y ago
Standalone ice machines in particular infuriates me as 90% of the machines on Amazon are copies of the same broken design: it rotates a plastic water container by firing a motor on one side only for a number of seconds without any sensor to stop it. As a result, if you use them heavily, it reliably develops stress fractures after a year or so. It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw... It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Most were up to a few years ago, but the big players went out of their way to make dependable ice makers--I thought. The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers. I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator. The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.

paranoidrobot 5y ago
Unofortunately some manufacturers are now implementing DRM to control your use of the ice maker function. See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-ridiculous-refrigerator-drm https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801
yardie 5y ago
10 years is actually quite good for major appliances. If you're warrantied for 3 and manage to get 10 years out if it you've exceeded the design parameters. Environmentally, replacing a broken fridge is usually the only time someone will even research something more energy efficient.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Meanwhile my Grandmother still uses her fridge from the 60s. It still has the kind of handles where you can get locked inside and almost die if you are on a very special episode of any 80's kid show.
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  Wow. So the idea is that we want them to wear out more quickly so that they buy a new product that's more energy efficient? That strikes me as terribly wasteful. What about the impacts of a discarded appliance?
  - curryst 5y ago
    The compressor is almost certainly the most expensive part of the fridge. It's also one of 2 moving parts on fridge (the other the being the fan, which is cheap), making it the most likely to fail. I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight. I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money. So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.