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About 4 months ago, our refrigerator stopped dispensing ice. It would still provide nice cold water, but whenever we switched to the ice setting, the fridge would just make a clicking noise.
I immediately assumed that it would be an expensive fix (which turned out to be wrong).
I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t really look into it much at the time and just started emptying the ice into a bucket that we kept in the freezer. I just assumed it would be too expensive to fix. And there was no way we were buying a new fridge just because the ice had to be taken out manually!
But after a few months of this, I was really missing the ice dispenser. So the other day, I decided to try harder to see if it was fixable. I found the following article with a list of reasons that a fridge might stop dispensing ice. And then I slowly went through each item on the list to see if it seemed like it might be our problem:
After going through the list, it seemed to me that #5, the ice bucket auger, was most likely the culprit for our fridge being on the fritz.
I found a QR code inside the fridge door that I could scan to go right to a webpage with details on my exact refrigerator model on the GE website. Then I found a picture of all the fridge parts. Once I found the auger, I was able to determine the part number.
Then I searched online to find out how much that part would cost. And this had me second guessing whether I wanted to attempt the fix. I found the part on Amazon, but it was over $100. I mean, I wasn’t 100% sure that replacing the auger would fix the problem. Did I want to spend that kind of money on a maybe fix?
But before I gave up, I did another search for the part and just googled it instead of limiting my search to Amazon, and guess what! There were lots of used ones for sale on eBay! And most were selling for somewhere between $20 and $35. (There’s a whole business out there taking broken appliances and scrapping them for parts – very frugal thumb!)
So I did some research to find out how hard it was to replace the auger.
One YouTube video later and it seemed super simple! Definitely something worth attempting to DIY. 😀
This was a great opportunity to cheaply learn if my ice dispensing problem was the auger. So I snatched one up on eBay for only $20.14 – that included tax and shipping!!!
When the part arrived today, I followed the YouTube video exactly, and just a few minutes later, voila! Our refrigerator was dispensing ice again like nothing ever went wrong.
I love a happy ending – frugal thumb style.
I hope this story gives you the confidence to try to use the internet to try fix things going on in your home too.