Maytag Refrigerator not Making Ice

[TechnicianBrian]

Model #MFI2568AEW, this french door, bottom mount refrigerator, one of the popular Ice2O series Maytag's, stopped making ice for the customer so it was back to ice trays for the time being. The ice makers in this model (known as Icelands) are a good design overall, but can be a bit more difficult to troubleshoot because of their location within a rather tight space. Fortunately for me, I didn't need to get very far to solve this one.



The ice maker in this refrigerator is a significant departure from most other Maytag designs because it is housed within a small freezer chamber inside the fresh food section of the refrigerator. This small area necessitated a design change to allow for the ice maker itself, the ice bin, and air diffuser assembly to all fit within the chamber. To make ice, chilled air is circulated directly from the freezer, up the rear wall into the ice maker chamber where it is used for ice production before it enters the fresh food section by way of a typical air diffuser design.

When dealing with an ice maker issue, its usually a good idea to start at the source of the problem and pull the ice maker out so you can get your eyes on the problem. Once I removed this unit from the enclosure, it was pretty obvious why it wasn't working. Looking at the photo above, the plastic stripper fingers had become dislodged and were keeping the ejection arms from returning to the home position to make another batch of ice. On closer inspection, the keeper that holds the fingers in place had broken off allowing the entire assembly to slide to the rear when ice was being ejected.

The unfortunate part of this call is the icemaker on these units is only replaceable as a unit because there are not individual parts available for repair. But after replacing the icemaker in this unit, at least it was once again making ice for the customer.

[JWWebster]

So let me get this straight: The freezer air travels across this icemaker and continues over to the fresh food compartment?Is that ice maker a modular design or some high teck gizmo? I bet the compressor is a 3 phase dc model that varries from 20 to 200 VDC to control the temp inside the freezer according to the demand set and the defrost is detirmined by the resistance detected from the evaporator coils. Dang it: It IS rocket science!