The short answer
Small, hollow or slow ice on the RVB family points at supply pressure or a partially blocked fill path; no ice at all points at a stopped supply, an arm or switch that has been left off, or a mould that has iced solid. On the one model this family covers, RVB477790 those two stories separate immediately and lead to different places.
What you observe on these models
- No ice at all, and the mould is empty and dry — Nothing is arriving: supply, valve, or the arm or switch that turns the unit off.
- Cubes are small, hollow or misshapen — Water is arriving but not enough of it, which is a pressure or restriction story.
- Ice is produced but tastes or smells wrong — A filter that is overdue, or cubes that have been in the bin long enough to absorb cabinet odours.
- The mould is full of solid ice rather than cubes — Harvest has stopped: the unit is filling and not releasing.
- NEAR MISS - no ice and a warm freezer — Temperature first: an ice maker will not run properly in a freezer above what food safety needs.
Causes, most likely first on the RVB family
- The unit has been switched off without anyone noticing — First on the RVB family because it costs nothing to rule out and because it is found on a large share of these calls. Arms get knocked, switches get pressed, and production simply stops.
- Supply side: valve, line, filter — Second. Everything from the household valve to the filter head restricts flow in the same way, and the symptom is cube size before it is cube count.
- Temperature in the freezer — Third, and the one people miss: ice making slows long before food starts to thaw, so it is an early warning of a cooling problem rather than an ice fault.
- Fill tube, mould and the ice maker module — Last. Where the mould is a solid block or the fill tube ices repeatedly, the repair is behind the panel and the diagnosis is a service call.
Check in this order, and why
- First: confirm the freezer is cold enough to make ice — Ranked first because a warm freezer explains the fault completely and because it matters more than the ice does.
- Second: check everything that can switch the unit off — Arm position, the switch, the bin sitting properly in place. All free, all common.
- Third: follow the water — Household valve, line, filter, then the fill tube. Small hollow cubes are a restriction; nothing at all is a stoppage.
- Fourth: give it a full day before judging — Then look again. On RVB477790 an ice maker needs hours per batch, and patience here saves an unnecessary part.
Before you open anything
Safety
Unplug the refrigerator or switch off its breaker before removing any panel or reaching into the ice maker area; a capacitor can hold a charge after the power is off. Close the household water valve before disturbing any fitting. Never thaw a fill tube with a heat gun or an open flame - warm water and patience are the only safe methods.
Models in the RVB family
Reference| Model number | Family key |
|---|---|
| RVB477790 | bosch:refrigerator:rvb |
When to call a technician
Everything on the supply side of RVB477790 is owner work: the household valve, the line, the filter, the arm and the bin. Everything inside the freezer wall is not. Call sooner if the freezer itself is not holding temperature, because that is a cooling fault that happens to show up as missing ice.
Sources — The symptom-report corpus recorded against Bosch RVB refrigerator pages for this fault is cited below. No share is quoted from it anywhere on this page: the snapshot reaches this page as a provenance chain without values, so every ordering here is technician judgement rather than a measured proportion.
Documented- amazon-reviews — amazon-reviews, fetched 2026-09-02
Other faults covered for the RVB family
Lead Appliance Repair Technician · 12 years experience
Experienced technician with 12 years specializing in washing machine and dryer repairs across all major brands.
