Product review (4 stars): Very good, although not perfect
Very good, although not perfect, ice maker. Like all the other "instant" ice makers, it is not refrigerated, but this one does appear to be well insulated and the ice keeps reasonably well. It pumps out ice like crazy. My wife and I both love ice, she will actually just fill up a large glass with ice and munch on it and this ice maker keeps up with both of us, and then some. Interestingly, I bought the little brother to this one, a smaller grey/silver Ivation ice maker with a blue control panel and only two selectable ice cube sizes and that thing was terrible. It made ice so slowly that it was melting faster than the ice maker could make it! I returned it and am much, much happier with this one. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is because the control panel sucks and the timer function has a serious flaw. It's a neat idea, you set the current time, then you can set the on time and the off time. Very nice, since we never need ice at 3 in the morning. However, it does a very annoying flaw. Lets say you have the shutoff timer set for 8 pm. On one particular day, at 7 pm, the ice maker shuts itself down because it sensed the ice bucket was full. At 10 pm, the ice has melted down enough that the ice maker turns itself on and starts making ice again. Que the fan coming on, the ice dropping into the bucket and the irritating half dozen or so loud beeps it will make when, at around midnight, it has filled itself up again. And again at 3. And again at 5. You get the picture. So all the timer does is shut it off if it's already running. It won't keep it off if it decides to turn itself back on again to make more ice. That actually is another annoying thing. If you want to turn the damn thing off and it's already turned itself off because the ice bucket is full, pressing the on/off button turns it on, not off. At which point it will start making ice just long enough to sense, again, that the ice bucket is full. It will then sound the alarm that the ice bucket is full and turn itself back off. At least until the ice melts down a little and the on/make ice/beep like crazy/turn back off cycle starts all over again. So, you need to be able to recognize that it's off because it turned itself off because the ice bucket is full which means you need to press the on/off button twice instead of just once. Once to manually turn it on and then again, right away, to manually turn it off. Once you manually turn it off, it won't turn back on even if the ice melts down. Or you can just unplug the damn thing. That does completely eliminates all the guesswork and complicated calculation. In summary. As an ice maker, 5 stars! Love having 3 selectable sizes and it makes ice by the truckload! As an automated device? 1 star. Too bad they didn't hire a halfway decent programmer to build and program the control circuitry. That should have been the easy part!