A few years ago we bought the first run of the Opal Ice Maker from FirstBuild before the line was sold to GE. It’s been running just fine since then, other than noticing the need to clean (sterilize) it more often than before. A couple of months ago we started a kitchen renovation and we sterilized the Opal and put it away for that 2 months. Saturday I brought it out of storage to use that weekend for a back-to-school party with the family and it wouldn’t produce ice. It would report that there was no water, even though there was definitely water in the system. We tried the usual steps to correct this:

Run the cleaning mode for a few minutes to prime the pump (could see water circulating so we know the pump is working
Use a syringe or turkey baster and gently inject water in the drain lines to prime and potentially remove air bubbles.
Hope

None of this resolved the issue so I decided to tear into it and see what we could find.

This video on YouTube was helpful in the teardown. But I decided to go a step further and get a look at the internal reservoir tank as it has a float that I thought might be defective. There is also a UVC LED that is in that tank. Upon removing the tank I was greeted with a gross discovery.

Disgusting innards of the Opal reservoir tank.

I tore it down further to liberate the tank and gave it a good bleach bath. The float assembly was pretty slimy as well but it appeared to be moving freely. As far as I can tell this is a magnetic reed float switch which should be relatively trouble-free.

I re-assembled everything back together and decided to see if the UVC light was functioning. I first checked the pinout on the mainboard to see what voltage it was delivering. When plugged in, and on the “Ice” mode it showed +12V, so it should be lighting up. I powered everything down, plugged the UVC LED back in and powered it back up and took the temperature on the back of the heat-sink felt it to see if it was getting warm. After a few minutes I couldn’t sense anything so I decided to put it inline with my multimeter to see if it registers any current draw…and it did not. As far as I can tell the lamp module is dead. I’m assuming that’s faulty and that might be why our tank was so disgusting. Just to be sure I didn’t have my test leads wired up backwards or something I ordered a UVC test card to double-check… Also I thought it would be cool to have one. That, however, isn’t why it’s not making ice.

After cleaning the reservoir tank by hand with scrub brushes and bleach, I got everything back together and ran the cleaning cycle. This time I added a capful of bleach to the water and gave it a few cycles. I then drained the tank and refilled with tap water to run it again. It would run for a bit and then it would complain about needing water, when it had plenty.

Turned everything off and pulled the float out of the tank to bench test it. On the bench, when the float is in the “up” position, red and black are shorted. Otherwise all three wires are open… I was puzzled by this for a bit as it just seems weird this float would fail like this…

For a test I decided to run the ice maker again, but with the float totally disconnected… And it started making ice… What? Now it made ice until the reservoir emptied so I switched it to the cleaning cycle and let it fill up again and switched it back to ice and it continued to make ice… At this point I might have a way to hack around it but then I decided to look at the float again… To me it seems like the float is a two position, with essentially a dead spot in the middle which signifies normal operation. So running it without the float connected makes sense as it would appear as everything is normal. I’m guessing the lower bound is meant to trigger the pump to start and the upper bound is meant to stop the pump from running. There seems to be logic built in that if the upper bound isn’t hit in a set period of time it will “know” that it needs water to be added.

When I was cleaning the tank and float, I took the floaty bit off the rod by removing the plastic c-clip on the bottom… What I didn’t know is the floaty bit has an orientation... While troubleshooting I flipped the flipped the floaty bit around and found that now when the float is down, black and red are shorted. When the float is up, white and black are shorted… This is an improvement from before where white and black were always open no matter the position…

I put the float back in and plugged it into the mainboard and it’s now making ice. I’m waiting for it to fully utilize all the water in the lower reservoir so that I can see a cycle of adding water and making sure it starts producing again.

If that works, then I’ll need to figure out a solution for the UVC light. Which I think is crucial to keeping this thing clean… The main problem is even if I do a bleach clean cycle on the machine and drain it for storage, that internal reservoir will still have some moisture and it’ll never fully dry. And I think that would allow for some growth in storage and might end up with the same problem. Best i can tell some “growth” was blocking the upper boundary of the float causing my issue. I’d like to prevent taking this thing apart again if I can help it.

And because I’m ridiculous I 3D printed a blanking cap for the top of the reservoir tank using the same thread profile as the original. Figured it would be good to have the original out so I can work up a replacement version.

I’m thinking if I can source a comparable UVC LED, and also wire a visible LED in series so we’ll get this in better shape AND get a warning if the circuit fails again. For now, I’m putting everything back together and getting back to making ice. We’re going to have to sanitize this thing weekly I think to keep the crud down.

Related Info:

Update: It’s been working fine for 24 hours so I think we’re good for now.