Ice Ice Baby

It's kind of funny how much you take ice for granted until you don't have it. Sure, ice in the Winter isn't such a great thing. Driving on it is certainly no fun. Plus, a large portion of my home state is still recovering from a huge ice storm that hit a couple of months ago now. Areas are just starting to work on clean up efforts with downed trees and things like that. Then of course there is the more luxurious side of ice. Those wonderful little (or big) cubes that cool your drink at just the right time.

I remember when I was much younger, there was a movie called The Ice Pirates. They used to show it in the middle of the day Saturdays and Sunday on the FOX network. It was from 1984 and it starred Robert Urich from Spencer for Hire as well as a bunch of other famous people. While not as much a spoof of Star Wars as Spaceballs, the similarities were still there and you could tell it was trying to be something it wasn't. It used to be my favorite movie, but I haven't seen it in forever, so I have a feeling much of the content probably hasn't aged too well over time.

Anyway, the premise of the movie is that in the far future, the universe is scarce of water and these pirates steal ice from a spaceship. It just gets goofy from there. According to IMDB, the movie was originally supposed to be a pretty serious Sci Fi movie, but when the budget got cut from $20 million dollars to $8 million dollars they rewrote the script as a comedy and went from there.

I mention all of this because just about a week ago now, we discovered that the ice maker stopped working in our refrigerator. For most of my life I had become pretty comfortable with making my own ice with those rigid plastic ice cube trays, but let me tell you, once you have an ice maker, it's hard to go back.

I honestly never realized just how much ice we use or just how convenient it is to have it so readily available until this past week when it was no longer there. Of course, I know there are probably folks reading this who might not have access to ice so readily and I fully acknowledge this is a first world problem. It's so amazing though, you put your glass under the dispenser and boom, there it is.

The bad part is, I was pretty busy last week, so I didn't have time to pull the thing apart to try to get an idea of what might be going on. Of course, since we had an ice maker, we never really bothered to keep any of our ice cube trays save for the large cube trays I have for my whiskey, but that really only makes about six at a time.

After struggling through the week to make those work, I finally carved out some time this past weekend to pull the thing apart.

Actually, on the way home on Saturday I finally broke down and spent $3 on a bag of ice from the convenience store down the road from our house. I am hoping that will get us through until I can get the maker in the fridge fixed.

So like I said, I did some research online and I discovered that it was most likely one of two things that might be wrong. Either the maker itself was bad, or the valve at the bottom of the fridge was bad. The maker is much easier to fix, but neither of them seemed like too horrible of things to fix.

I decided to start with the maker itself, so I pulled it out of the freezer yesterday and started taking a look at it. From my "expert" assessment, it seems the mechanism that controls the feeder arm has seized up. I can see the switch that is supposed to be depressed to tell the device to make ice. When the bin fills, the feeder arm moves and it releases the switch so that the maker knows the bin is full and it stops making more ice.

As I said though, the arm won't move to depress the switch, so I took some photos of the maker and jumped online to see about ordering a replacement. $140 later I have an OEM part on its way to me from Amazon, and hopefully by Wednesday morning we should once again have a steady stream of ice flowing out of our freezer. As I said though, it's pretty crazy how you don't realize just how much some of these modern luxuries are. I know we would survive if we had to go back to making our own ice cubes, but it's so amazingly easy to just have it done for me automatically.

Anyway, that's my drama from the past week. Pretty benign am I right? Do you have an ice maker? Do think your world would stop if something happened to it? Let's talk about it in the comments!