Appliance care tips, repair guides, and industry news from the Santa Ana Appliance Repair team.
Ice makers are one of the most fragile parts of a refrigerator. They’re also one of the most fixable. Before assuming the worst, work down this list.
Sounds silly, but the wire feeler arm (or the on/off switch) gets bumped constantly, particularly when someone reaches in for a bag of frozen food. If the arm is in the up position, the maker is off. Push it down.
I get some version of this call every week: “My dishwasher is only two years old and my glasses come out cloudy.” Or: “The washer smells musty no matter how much I clean it.” Or: “The ice maker keeps freezing up and jamming.” Different appliances, different symptoms, same root cause about eight times out of ten in this city: Santa Ana’s water.
Coastal Orange County cities blend in a fair amount of imported water from the Metropolitan Water District, which softens things up. Santa Ana leans much more heavily on the Orange County Groundwater Basin — water pumped straight out of the aquifer that’s been recharged by the Santa Ana River for a century. That groundwater picks up dissolved calcium and magnesium as it moves through the local geology, and it comes out of the tap tasting fine but testing hard to very hard, commonly in the 15 to 20 grains-per-gallon range depending on the well field serving your block. (Your exact number is on the annual water quality report the city publishes — worth a look if you’ve never checked.) For comparison, anything north of 10.5 grains per gallon is classified “very hard” by USGS standards. Santa Ana isn’t borderline. It’s solidly in that zone.
Here’s a number that explains half the repair calls I run in Santa Ana: appliance engineers design a residential washer around roughly 6 to 8 loads a week. That’s the assumption baked into the bearing ratings, the suspension components, the motor duty cycle — everything.
Santa Ana has some of the largest average household sizes in Orange County. In a house with six or seven people, that washer isn’t doing 6 loads a week. It’s doing 12. Sometimes 15. Same machine, double the duty cycle. The math is simple and unforgiving: a washer rated for a 12-year service life at 6 loads a week hits the same cumulative wear in about 6 years.
A big share of our Santa Ana calls start the same way: the refrigerator in a rental unit quits, and before anyone books a repair, there’s a standoff. The tenant thinks the landlord should pay. The landlord isn’t sure they have to. Food is going warm while everybody researches.
We work for both sides — property managers with forty doors and tenants paying out of pocket for their own washer. So here’s the plainest explanation I can give of how this actually works, plus the practical stuff: how to document a request, how authorization works when the caller and the payer are different people, and what repairs actually cost so nobody gets taken for a ride.
Orange County summers aren’t extreme by desert standards, but they’re more than enough to stress your appliances. When temperatures climb into the 90s — and they do, especially inland around Santa Ana, Tustin, and Anaheim — your refrigerator, ice maker, and dryer all work harder than usual. That’s when latent problems become full-blown breakdowns.
Here’s what I tell every homeowner to check before summer hits.
This is the single most impactful thing you can do for your refrigerator’s longevity. The condenser coils — usually located behind or underneath the unit — dissipate heat from the refrigeration cycle. When they’re clogged with dust, pet hair, and kitchen grease, your compressor has to work overtime.
If you own a Samsung French-door refrigerator manufactured between 2014 and 2022, pay attention. Samsung has acknowledged widespread ice maker defects affecting millions of units across the RF22, RF23, RF24, RF25, RF26, RF27, RF28, and RF29 model families. While Samsung has offered extended warranties and free repairs on some models, many homeowners are still dealing with the fallout.
The issue centers on Samsung’s in-door ice maker design. Affected units experience one or more of the following:
One of the most common questions I get from homeowners is: “Harry, should I fix this thing or just buy a new one?”
After 20 years of repairing appliances across Orange County, I’ve developed a straightforward framework for answering that question honestly. And I do mean honestly — I make my living repairing appliances, but I’ll be the first to tell you when a repair doesn’t make financial sense.
Here’s the simplest rule of thumb: if the repair costs more than 50% of what a comparable new appliance would cost, replace it. This applies to standard appliances — your typical Whirlpool, GE, or Samsung units.