Water or Ice Tasting Stale: Filter Age, Scale and Idle Lines

What it
usually means.

The water in a refrigerator dispenser or an ice maker has passed through a supply line, often a filter, a valve, a reservoir or tank and, for ice, a mold, a plate or an auger in the cold. Each step can change its taste. A filter cartridge does not stop working suddenly; the carbon inside fills up, and the odors and taste it was removing come back well before the indicator changes. Water that sits in the line and the tank on a trip or in a little-used dispenser goes flat. Ice absorbs smells from open food in the freezer and grows a stale crust in a bin that has not been emptied in weeks. On hard water, scale builds on the ice mold or plate and in the valve, and the ice turns cloudy and smaller. In a standalone or nugget ice maker, slime can form in the reservoir and the drain. Most of this is upkeep: a new filter and a flush, an emptied and washed bin, a descaling or clean cycle with the product the maker names, and odors removed from the freezer. If the water valve leaks, the ice maker stops filling or the dispenser pump fails, that is a repair for the sister refrigerator or ice maker repair site.