---
title: "No Ice, But the Water Dispenser Works: What That Narrows It To"
description: "How do I know if my LG ice maker is on: the ten-second test that splits a no-ice problem in half, the fill tube that freezes, and the three codes"
url: "https://lgmiami.support/blog/no-ice-but-water-works/"
date_modified: "2026-09-05"
Category: "Common Problems"
---


# No Ice, But the Water Dispenser Works: What That Narrows It To

## How do I know if my LG ice maker is on, and why there is no ice

Two questions arrive together and they have different answers. Whether the ice maker is switched on is easy: on most LG cabinets it is either a wire arm inside the compartment that has been lifted to the off position, or a setting on the dispenser panel. Lift the arm down, or turn the setting on, and give it a day — an ice maker takes hours to produce anything, so nothing you do here is judged in the driveway.

The second question is the interesting one, and there is a test that answers half of it in ten seconds.

## Run the water dispenser

Ice and water arrive through the same line. They come off the mains, through a shut-off valve, through the filter, through the inlet valve on the machine, and only then do they part company: some of it goes to the dispenser in the door and some of it goes up a small tube into the ice tray.

So if water comes out of the dispenser normally, everything before that fork is proved working. The supply is on, the valve is open, the filter is passing, and the inlet solenoid is opening. That is four things ruled out with one glass.

And if water is slow or absent as well, the ice maker is probably innocent and the answer is upstream — a tap somebody closed and never fully reopened, a line crushed when the cabinet was pushed back, a filter cartridge that has never been changed, or air in the line after one that has.

## The part that freezes, and has no code

Assume water is fine. Now the question is inside the compartment, and there is one cause here that no code will ever report.

The fill tube is a small tube that delivers water from the valve into the tray. It ends inside a space kept below freezing, it carries water intermittently rather than continuously, and in a humid house it grows a plug of ice at the mouth. Once that plug forms, water stops arriving, the tray never fills, and the machine has nothing to complain about — because as far as the control board is concerned, nothing has failed.

The test costs nothing. Take the ice bucket out, find the tube at the back of the compartment, and hold a warm damp cloth around it for ten minutes. If ice appears the next day, that was the whole problem, and the real question becomes what let the warm moist air in — usually a door held a fraction open by a bottle, or a gasket that has hardened.

## The three that are coded

LG does publish codes for the compartment, and they cover air, cold and mechanism:

- **IF** — the fan that carries cold to the ice maker. On the cabinets with the ice maker in the door, cold has to be delivered there, and this is what delivers it.- **IS** — the temperature sensor that decides the cubes are frozen and can be harvested. Lose it and the cycle stalls with a tray of ice sitting there.- **It** — the motor that turns the harvest and pushes finished cubes into the bucket.

That third one has a signature worth recognizing: a **full tray with an empty bucket**. If you take the bucket out and the tray above it is packed with ice that never left, the mechanism is the answer and no amount of waiting will change it.

## What is not on this list

There is no undercounter ice machine in LG's US catalog. Its only ice-maker products are the automatic ice maker kits that go inside a refrigerator, so an ice call on this badge is a refrigerator call and is diagnosed with the refrigerator's own tools — including the trick of forcing the last code back onto the display by holding **Freezer Temperature** and **Express Frz** together for three seconds.

## The order that saves a visit

- Run the water dispenser. Water working narrows it enormously.- Check the arm or the setting. It costs nothing and it happens more than people admit.- Take the bucket out and look in with a torch. Full tray and empty bucket, or empty dry tray — two different problems.- Warm cloth on the fill tube for ten minutes, then wait a day.- If there is a code, write it down before cutting the power.

Most no-ice calls end somewhere in the first four, and the ones that do not are usually a five-minute part in an awkward place.

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