I was at a friend’s house last weekend admiring the new high-end appliances in their kitchen…until I wanted to get some ice from the in-door dispenser on their top of the line, brand-new Samsung refrigerator. But I couldn’t get any ice. The older ice had melted and re-froze in the bottom of the dispenser.
So, I opened the door and tried to grab some ice manually…no can do. The gap between the top of the ice tray and the bottom of the housing is less than two inches. Unless the ice cubes are right below the gap, you can’t get enough of your fingers inside the tray to grab any cubes. No luck with tongs either. My friends have had this happen before, and the work-around is to pour hot water through the dispenser to melt the ice and start the process all over. The design doesn’t permit removing the ice tray if there’s an iceberg in the bottom of it. I’m sure the book says to turn off the refrigerator and let it defrost naturally…along with hundreds of dollars of food.
The design is such that the dispenser, computer, and ice-maker are all in the door. The path from the bottom of the ice tray to the outside world is fairly air-tight. Any warm air leaking around the hatch goes up through the ice tray and melts the ice in the tray. Combine that with a computer mounted in the door adjacent to the ice dispenser dumping heat into the door.
I’ve also seen this happen on a couple of other brands of refrigerators that have the ice maker in the door. Don’t remember the brands.
Older U.S.-designed models have the ice-maker and dispenser separate from the door-mounted hatch. If you do get an ice jamb, it’s limited to the door and not the ice tray. Also, the ice-path is not air-tight. The advantage here is that any warm air leaking past the dispensing hatch is dissipated and cooled before it can get to the bottom of the ice tray.
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