The short version
On the Arctic Wind ABMV refrigerator family an ice maker that has stopped is far more often a water-supply or a temperature problem than a failed ice maker. The roster here is one base number, ABMV171E, carried twice in the parts data, and on cabinets built this way the ice maker only runs once the freezer compartment is genuinely cold, so a freezer sitting a little warm will produce exactly this complaint with nothing broken at all.
What the bin is telling you
- Hollow or undersized cubes — Water is arriving but not enough of it. Points at fill volume, a partly restricted line or a saddle valve that has never fully opened.
- Ice forms but never drops into the bin — The harvest half of the cycle has stopped. On these cabinets that is the ice maker itself or ice bridging the mould, not the water side.
- NEAR MISS - no ice and the whole cabinet is warm — That is a cooling fault, and the ice maker stopping is a symptom of it. Read the cooling page for this family.
Ranked by what actually turns up
- Shut-off arm or bin sensor reading full — At the top because it is the only cause on this page that can be created accidentally by putting the shopping away, which makes it both the commonest and the least suspected.
- Household water supply, saddle valve or filter restriction — Here because everything upstream of the cabinet is invisible from the kitchen, and because the classic trigger is something that happened to the plumbing rather than to the appliance.
- Fill tube frozen or ice bridged in the mould — Water dribbling after the valve closes freezes in the fill tube, and the next fill backs up. The result is a mould that never fills properly and a sheet of ice under the bin.
- Ice maker module, motor or thermostat failed — Last because it is the most expensive answer on the page and the one least often correct. A module fitted to a cabinet with any fault above it will behave exactly like the one it replaced.
- Body: The order here follows the water: supply, valve, fill, freeze, harvest. On the ABMV listings that path crosses the cabinet wall, so checking it in flow order is what stops you opening the freezer for a fault that lives under the sink.
Work through this in order
- Check when the fault started against anything else that changed — A filter change, a house move or a kitchen refit immediately before the fault points upstream of the cabinet.
- Trace the supply line to its shut-off — Confirm the valve is fully open and the line is not crimped where the cabinet was pushed back into place.
- Body: This sequence is set by cost of access. Everything checkable with the bin out comes before anything that needs the unit pulled away from the wall, and the ice maker module itself comes last of all.
Before you open anything
Safety
Switch the unit off at the breaker or unplug it before removing the module, and close the water shut-off first. A capacitor can hold a charge after the power is off. If water has reached anything electrical inside the cabinet, stop and call - do not power the appliance back up to test it.
Models in the ABMV family — Every listing this page generalizes over. Check the number on your rating plate against it before ordering a part. A starred entry in the table is the same base number recorded a second way in the parts data; treat it as the same platform for this fault unless your own parts diagram says otherwise.
Reference| Model number | Family key |
|---|---|
| ABMV171E | arctic-wind:refrigerator:abmv |
| ABMV171E* | arctic-wind:refrigerator:abmv |
Where the owner line is
The line on the ABMV listings is the water fitting and the freezer liner. Bins, arms, thermometers, filters and shut-off valves are owner work; inlet valves and modules are not, and a cabinet that is also warming is a cooling job before it is an ice job.
Other pages for this family
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