The short answer
On the HS family the usual reason a Criterion refrigerator is not making ice is fill arm or switch in the off position, and on the compact or secondary-cabinet build it outranks compartment not cold enough to trigger harvest. The check that confirms which build you have is simple — a small freezer compartment with no grille shares its cold with the whole cabinet and struggles to hold a mould at harvest temperature. Everything on the water side — the arm, the filter, the line, the fill tube — is owner work; the harvest module is not.
What you observe on these models
- The mould is full of ice that never drops — Water is arriving; the mechanism or the sensor is not releasing it.
- Ice on the freezer floor rather than in the bin — An overfill or a misaligned fill, which is a leak story more than a production story.
- The door water flow has also weakened — A shared restriction, which usually means the filter.
- Cubes are small, hollow or half-formed — A fill problem rather than a harvest problem, which points at flow.
- No ice at all and the bin is empty — Either nothing is filling or nothing is harvesting, and the mould tells you which.
- NEAR MISS — no ice and the cabinet is not cold either — That is a cooling fault first; the ice maker is downstream of it and the cooling page applies.
Causes, most likely first on the HS family
- Fill arm or switch in the off position — Ranked first here: every ice maker has a way to be switched off, and it is invariably a lever or a slider inside the freezer where a bag of food can move it.
- Compartment not cold enough to trigger harvest — Second: the mould only releases when its sensor reads cold enough. A compartment sitting above that threshold produces a mould full of slush and no harvest at all.
- Supply line kinked behind the cabinet — Third: the line is soft tubing and the appliance gets pushed back against it. A kink reduces flow to a trickle without leaking a drop.
- Water filter restricting flow — Fourth: a filter at the end of its life throttles the fill without stopping it. Cubes get smaller over weeks, which is why the owner rarely connects the two.
- Inlet valve or low supply pressure — Fifth: the valve opens for a fixed time rather than to a level, so anything that reduces flow leaves a part-filled mould and a cube that never forms properly.
- Harvest motor or ejector module — Sixth: it sits low because everything above it is more common and cheaper to exclude, not because it is rare in absolute terms.
Check in this order, and why
- Find the arm or switch and confirm it is on — Free, instant, and the answer more often than it should be.
- Check whether the compartment is genuinely hard-frozen — A freezer holds food safely at 0 °F (−18 °C) or below, and a mould needs that cold to harvest.
- Pull the appliance out and follow the line — A kink behind the cabinet reduces flow without leaking, so nothing else shows it.
Before you open anything
Safety
Isolate the appliance at the plug or the breaker before opening anything, and treat the capacitor as live for a minute after. The door interlock stays connected, always: it stops the fan when the door opens and that is the whole point of it. Stop at once if you see oil at the compressor or the tubing, because the sealed system is open and that is licensed work. Moving a loaded cabinet is a two-person job on a tall unit.
Models in the HS family
Reference| Model number | Family key |
|---|---|
| HS-188CN(UR-BD146-DQ)-F | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-188CN(UR-BD146-DQ)-R | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-262CN(UR-BD202-DQ)-F | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-262CN(UR-BD202-DQ)-R | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-386CN(UR-BD300-DQ)-F | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-386CN(UR-BD300-DQ)-R | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-507FWENDT | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
| HS-507FWENDT-R | criterion:refrigerator:hs |
When to call a technician
Call when the arm is on, the compartment is genuinely cold, the tube is clear and the filter is fresh, and there is still no ice. Call sooner if the mould fills and the cubes never release, because that is the harvest mechanism and it sits behind a cover that also carries the wiring to the module.
