Product review (5 stars): GREAT TO USE IN A MOTORHOME!!
I have a Class "A" 35 foot Motorhome and like most motorhomes under "One Hundred Thousand Dollars" the refrigerators are on the small side and in the freezer you need every inch. This ice maker was just what I was looking for, the prices is right and the size is perfect to store in the motorhome. Every few days I pour some bottled water in and make a zip-lock bag of ice and put it in the freezer. It took all the worries out of running out of ice. If we have guests it's great!!! Once it gets to temperature it seems to take off and fills up fast. It is also great for making crushed ice because the cubes have a hole in the center and are easy to smash. Only problem I have is that it is heavy (for me, I have a bad back) and to pick it up to the sink to clean it good is ruff. All & all: Well made, Nice looking and the only noise is the cubes falling which I find kind of neat myself :)

It was about two months after the above review of the Ice Maker when it broke!! I did read reviews where others had problems with the water pump but I thought it was just an air bubble because mine stopped pumping a few times and all I had to do was tilt it a bit thinking I was releasing the air.

WRONG!! one day that dreaded "out of water light came on and that's all she wrote. I called and received no satisfaction at all!! Figuring it would be too much trouble to send it back I decides to repair it myself. That is what I did for a living, R&D engineer, I have repaired more sophisticated machinery then a simple Ice Maker. I worked for "Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center" in New York City for over 15 years repairing Picker & GE X-Ray machines and Linear Escalators. I was schooled by these companies and was a "Jack of ALL Trades". Enough of tooting my horn.

The ice maker is built very well, like clockwork inside. It has a good compressor and the design is excellent!! It has one flaw, the water pump! I took the pump out and it is a medical grade pump with a ISO certification on it. (ISO 9001:2000) Problem, after a long day of hunting on my computer and my connections I could not find a replacement pump. It is made in China by "HENG SHAN" model # FS60202M , DC 12 volts 0.23 amps.

What I did was disassemble the pump, it is a tiny thing. Easy to take apart, it is a magnet driven pump. One electro magnet spinning in a sealed housing insulated from the water. It drives a smaller magnet that has the impellor attached that moves the water. Age old design used in many things such as fish tank filter pumps.

I found three problems with the pump: (1) the electro magnet circuit board had a cold solder joint. (2) one of the windings had no continuity, which took me a long time to find the break with a magnifying glass and repair it. (3) both the electro magnet shaft and the impellor shaft were shimmed to tight which I found out after I repaired (1) & (2). That could have been the cause of the winding getting hot and breaking. The time it did run for was intermittent, it did stop on me several times, that was most likely the cold solder joint. Between that and the shafts being shimmed to tight put a strain and high resistance on the windings until one of the winding wires melted... Hence, a dead pump!

After all the repairs (about 12 hours work) it runs great now, has been for weeks. You can hear how much stronger the pump is. If you can not repair it yourself there are plenty of small 12 volt magnet drive pumps that you can replace it with, just replacing it is easy, just take your time taking the back to cover halfs off (lots of screws). GOOD LUCK!!

ps: If you need advice on repair of the pump email me at willphov@gmail.com and I will try to get back to you.