Why is my ice machine not making ice?

An ice machine that keeps running but makes little or no ice is usually water-starved, scaled up, or running too hot: a clogged water filter, a scale-fouled evaporator, a condenser choked with grease and dust, or a failed inlet valve. In a Las Vegas kitchen all four happen faster than the manual suggests, and a down machine costs the bar money every hour it waits.

Ten minutes of checks before calling

Confirm the water supply valve is open and the machine actually fills. Check the water filter's age; a filter months past its change date chokes flow before anything else does. Make sure the bin control is not reading full: a stuck bin thermostat keeps the machine in harvest-off mode while the bin sits half empty. Then feel the room: a cuber squeezed next to a cook line in a 90-degree kitchen makes substantially less ice than its nameplate says, and a preventive maintenance visit can move it back toward spec.

Scale and the evaporator

Valley tap water is hard, and scale plates the evaporator like a tea kettle. A scaled evaporator freezes slower, harvests late, and eventually makes cloudy or hollow cubes. Scale also jams the water distribution holes at the top of the evaporator, so some cubes never form. The fix is a proper descaling cleaning and sanitizing cycle, which on a badly scaled machine is the difference between a machine that recovers and one that limps into a compressor failure.

Condenser, harvest, and refrigerant

Grease-laden air from the fry line mats a condenser coil; the head pressure climbs and the machine cuts cycles short to protect itself. A failed hot-gas or harvest solenoid freezes a beautiful sheet of ice that never releases. Low refrigerant from a slow leak does the same as scale, warmer and slower, and only a licensed technician touches the sealed system. Those are real ice machine repair visits, typically in the few-hundreds range for the valley, with the company confirming the fault and price before parts change.

Restaurants that keep filters current and schedule twice-yearly cleanings see this page's failures a fraction as often. When the machine is down and the bar is out of ice, say the bin status and the last cleaning date on the request form; those two facts get the right tech dispatched the same day.