Relative Something

I am beginning to discover some issues of living alone that I assume are common knowledge to those who are well-familiar with the situation. One obvious trick is buying groceries. Getting the quantities aligned between the shelf-life of produce and the amount I consume in a span of time has become an important goal for me.

One thing that I didn’t anticipate needing to manage was the ice maker in our kitchen freezer. After Cyndie moved to Boston, the amount of ice being dispensed from the door of the refrigerator/freezer on a daily basis dropped dramatically. My ice use is very sporadic. It happens in spurts where I find myself filling a cup hourly when I enter a phase of habit to have ice chunks melting in my mouth. I don’t normally add ice to my drinking water, so when I’m not in that mode of sucking on ice, I don’t find myself using the ice in our freezer, at all.

After Cyndie had been gone for over a month, I discovered that the ice in the bucket inside the door of our freezer was so old it was becoming one solid block, instead of individual semi-spheres. Apparently, she used just enough ice to keep it from stagnating. Or, maybe she was dumping it out when it was getting old. I never needed to notice.

When I discovered the block of old ice, I removed the bucket and left it out to defrost. Being unfamiliar with the controls on this appliance, I assumed I would need to turn the ice maker off to prevent it from dumping a fresh batch of ice when the bucket had been removed. It has an infra-red sensor to detect when the bucket is full and stops dumping new ice.

The only control I could see, was on the infra-red sensor panel. I slid the paddle switch to the ‘off’ position. When the bucket was clean and dry, I re-installed it in the freezer door and moved the switch back to ‘on.’ After several days, the urge that had me seeking ice took me back to the freezer door. I received wonderfully fresh, clear half-moons of frozen goodness. One cup full. After that, nothing.

After a couple more days, it became obvious something had stopped working. I monkeyed with the switch. I felt all around the surfaces of the ice machine in search of some additional control switch, or for evidence of ice. Not wanting to start the search for a physical manual in our multitude of possible file locations, I went online for insight. I watched an entire video on how to replace parts on ice makers that were different from the one I have. I found a way to replace the infra-red sensor control board on the model that looked identical to mine. The information from that video revealed that the behavior observed from the red indicator on my machine meant it was working as designed. I opened that door about 15 times to look, poke, prod, grunt (I got my finger stuck one time), squeeze, and even just will the dang thing to work. I did nothing technically logical toward affecting the function of the device.

Shortly after that, I heard a valve click and water flowing for a few seconds. Later, I was startled by the loud sound of ice hitting the empty bucket. Then, again, and again. This morning there is over a half-bucket full.

Look at that. I fixed it!