A few months ago, the ice maker in our Kenmore refrigerator completely quit on us. The rest of the fridge was working fine and we really didn’t see the need to replace the entire fridge just to have a working ice maker. On the other hand, I really like having an ice maker and wasn’t ready to go back to filling up those little cube trays (in fact we threw ours out!).
I did a quick search on the internet and learned there are two basic reasons why an ice maker can stop working. Either the line feeding the water into the ice maker is frozen, or the ice maker itself has stopped working for one reason or another. A quick check of the water line into the ice maker made it clear that a frozen line was not our issue. (If you do have a frozen line, turn off the fridge until it thaws, clear the ice, and see if that fixes the issue. If it refreezes, your issue is with your fridge’s temperature controls.)
Rather than call a repairman, Jay decided he wanted to attempt to replace the ice maker himself. Since we have a Kenmore refrigerator that was made by Whirlpool, I figured a replacement part would be easy to find. The challenge might be in the actual replacement process. I found this great YouTube video that walked us through each step of the process.
My assumption that it would be easy to find a replacement ice maker was a bit off. I called our local Sears thinking they might carry replacement Kenmore or Whirlpool ice makers but they were out of stock for our model. We knew that we could definitely find one at an online store like Homeclick, but really wanted to have it in hand to compare before buying. We found a local repair shop that had two, so we grabbed one.
By following the directions in the video above, we pulled our old ice maker out and had the new one installed in less than 30 minutes! Having no repair bill other than the cost of the replacement part made me pretty happy!!
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