I have a side-by-side refrigerator freezer. It has a built-in ice maker that worked properly until I moved the refrigerator to a different room. Now there are no water pipes connected to it.

It takes about six months for the freezer to get into the state shown below, gradually, a bit at a time.

What is causing this, and how can I make it stop?

tanstaafl.

Have you turned the ice-making mechanism OFF ?

Is that basket part of the ice-maker, or just a sliding basket tray?

I didn't know I could do that. I'll look and see. But if there is no water supply connected to the refrigerator, where is all that ice coming from? There is probably four or five liters of it there.

It is not part of the ice maker (the freezer dispenses ice cubes on the outside of the door) but it is not sliding at the moment as the bottom of it is pretty well locked in ice.

tanstaafl.

Edit: The ice maker is controlled electronically. Select water, crushed ice, or cubed ice, and the selected button lights up and stays lit until you select a different option. There is an option called "Lock" that turns those lights off, and I assume that is how the ice maker is turned off. The Lock light is (and has been) on.

I think most ice-makers have a tray that the frozen ice "cubes" get dropped into. And there is usually a metal lever of some sort that is used to detect "tray full" and turn off the ice-maker.

Simply raising that lever by hand, until it clicks and stays in the "up" position, will normally disable the ice-maker completely. This is in the owners manual, if the refrigerator has it.

As for the frozen mass of ice at the bottom of the freezer, it must be from condensing/freezing moisture from humid air. This used to be "normal" when you and I were children, but modern "frost-free" freezers have dehumidifiers and/or heaters to prevent it.

So cause #1: perhaps there is a source of humid air entering the machine? Possibly from the still-operating (?) ice-maker mechanism? Or from a leaky door seal (or something stuck to the door seal)?

Or cause #2: something has gone wrong with the defrost circuitry. Most likely a sensor has failed.

Cheers

I don't know if making an edit to a submitted post flags that post as unread or not, so I am just asking that you check and see the edit I made to my previous post, basically saying that I think the ice maker is and has been turned "Off".

tanstaafl.

I second the opinion that the frost free stuff is kaput. Most freezers use heaters to melt the ice, it is likely that the relay or solder joint on it is bad.

Every time you open the door, all the heavy cold air runs out the bottom and hot humid air rushes in. The freezer will load up on water because of this. The same thing happens if the door seals aren't perfect, as the freezer cycles thru its cool / off / cool cycle, the inside changes pressure and will expel inside air and intake outside air.

That hole in the door for the ice cubes is a prime suspect.

All of which you'd never notice if the defrost stuff is doing its stuff.

Typically, the door controls just tell how to dispense ice on demand. The maker makes it whether you use the dispenser or not. The "lock" button on the front is to keep little kids from making a mess.

Our old ice maker used the wire to set to "off"; our new one has an electric on/off rocker switch - albeit one that's often slightly frozen in place and needs a bang to get it to change.

If you disconnected the water feed to the maker, did you plug the hose/hole in the back of the box? That might be letting moisture in.

Ultimately, I'm thinking the self defroster isn't working properly.

AFAIK, that "lock" function on the ice maker doesn't turn it off. It's a child proof safety so that children can't let the water tap run. (on my Samsung side-by-side anyway) Turning the ice maker completely off is usually done by pushing some button on the inside of the fridge.

Alternative theory: I believe this is a symptom of a blocked freezer drain. When the automatic defroster runs (which I suspect is working fine), it heats up any ice buildup on the evaporator, turning it into water. However, that water now has to go somewhere, otherwise you've just relocated the problem -- once the heater turns off again, the water will simply re-freeze wherever it now is in the freezer unit.

To avoid this, there is a drain hole below the evaporator which will allow the defrosted water to exit the freezer compartment and collect in the drain pan underneath the unit, where it will evaporate naturally.

If the drain hole is blocked, the water will instead remain inside the freezer, eventually filling up the bottom of the evaporator compartment (which is usually behind a cover at the top rear of the freezer) and running down the rear wall of the freezer to collect at the bottom, where it will slowly form a mass of ice.

Some links that might be useful:

https://www.applianceblog.com/mainforums/threads/ge-profile-ice-at-bottom-of-freezer-section.17777/
https://careandrepairs.ca/how-to-fix/refrigerator-repair/defrost-drain-is-clogged/

Both of my fridges have a rocker switch on the ice maker to turn it off.

Not sure this is relevant to your case. But every fridge that I ever had, including my current one which is however 14 years old (!!) had/has a similar problem to the freezer section of it. No matter what manufacturers claim, they always slowly and gradually accumulated ice in the freezer section, so that every once in a while (one year? Two years? Maybe more) you need to empty it, "defrost" it (often helping yourself with a hairdryer to speed up the process :D) and put all that can be saved back in, throw away all that can't be put back in.

No ice maker device involved or at all included in the fridge - as it usually happens in this part of the world where, for some weird reason, ppl don't like it/are not interested in it, and prefer to have more space in the regular fridge.

I always thought, and still think, that I was doing something "wrong" and there must be a way to prevent this, also because most fridges are, I believe, "no-frost" or whatever they call them. I never wanted to spend time to find out, as it normally takes such a long time to happen. But, it looks very similar to what happened to you.

If this implies that there used to be, in fact, water pipes connected, I'd consider the possibility that - if not sealed where pipes used to be - air humidity may just get into the freezer section, condense, turn into water and then ice. Maybe all you need to do is seal some hole somewhere.

I would say that the chance of you being right on the cause of this is about 99% true.

The ice on the bottom of the freezer is crystal clear, not hoarfrost as would be the case if it were humidity condensing bit by bit. It is extremely likely that it is liquid water from the defrost system running down to the bottom and then freezing.

Unfortunately I can't do anything about it for a while. We just returned from a massive ($11,000 pesos) Costco grocery trip, stocking up for the next stage of the lock down, and other than where that block of ice is sitting, there is not 10 cubic inches of space open in that freezer (I learned from experience that anything placed on that ice becomes in that ice PDQ), and the "main" refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen is similarly encumbered. Once we eat enough of the food, I'll be able to transfer the remainder to the kitchen, get out the hair dryer and the tools and have a look.

Thank you very much for those links.

tanstaafl.

In some cases it's done with a secret combination of button presses and/or button holds on the front control panel. On my Samsung fridge it's like that. Inside the ice maker is a reset button, but no other internal buttons or switches to turn off the ice maker. I have to do certain ctrl-alt-del style button presses on the front of the fridge to get it to shut off the ice maker. I'm sure they're in the manual somewhere but I'd just search the internet for instructions.

I wonder if some of that unwanted ice is mostly just the leftover water in the ice maker tubes (and the pump and the filter canister) slowly leaking out over time after the fridge got moved.

If it's humidity, there may be instructions on how to correctly plug up the water-input hole so that humidity doesn't get in.

I had something similar with our side-by-side when we rented a few years back. These days freezers do auto-defrost cycles. I the case of my freezer there was a drain tube that would get clogged. Every few months we'd notice some water on the floor, and that was my signal. I would hammer out as much ice as possible, and then use a syringe to squirt hot water into the drainage hole to melt the ice in there.

Why this occurs I don't know, maybe it is just not sitting at the right angle...

The last time that ice on the bottom problem happened to me I had repaired a relay in the bottom of the fridge, but in moving it had dislodged some crap that fell into the drain hole. Once that got wet and froze it formed a plug of ice in the drain, leading to what you see there. I had to let it melt, and hit it with an air hose. After that I never had a problem again.

Not a freezer but a fridge issue I have, there's a plate at the back of the fridge which is cold and has a little ice on it, but the fridge is not cold at all, very near ambient temperature. It's only 3 or 4 years old.

I recently had a problem where the air vent between the freezer and fridge had frozen closed. The freezer was too cold, and the fridge not cold enough. 12 hours of defrosting later (several with a hair dryer on low), it worked fine.

This is a tall fridge, no freezer. It has to be air related I guess. Will see if the fan's running

Not even an ice cube maker? If it is freezing ice cubes but the cold is not percolating down to the rest of the refrigerator, that would be a clue.

tanstaafl.

Mystery is [finally] solved.

I called in the pros (i.e., the fabled Maytag repairman) and he opened the freezer door and knew instantly what the problem was and how to fix it.

There is no drain on this freezer. The defrost/dehumidify functions are handled by a small ventilation fan that cycles air from the freezer into the refrigerator side and returns it. This carries away the excess moisture before it ever condenses on the walls of the freezer, and it brings cold air into the refrigerator, the amount regulated by a sliding lever to keep it at the correct temperature.

The repair took 45 minutes with a two man crew who drove 50 miles from Guadalajara, and cost $2,000. Fortunately that was $2,000 pesos, not dollars. Figure $89 USD, of which $58 was for parts. Gotta love Mexico.

tanstaafl.

What was the repair?

Oh, I guess that would help, wouldn't it.

The repair was to replace the fan motor. That took about five minutes. The rest of the time was spent removing the iceberg from the bottom of the freezer, using special tools available only to factory-trained and authorized Maytag repairmen, that is a hammer and a screwdriver used as a chisel.

tanstaafl.

I'm surprised they don't use...


a cold chisel.

Indeed