Symptom · Viking built-in refrigeration
Why are the cubes small or hollow?
In one sentence
Undersized cubes, hollow shells and half-filled rows all say one thing: the mould is not getting its full charge of water, so the fault sits in the supply rather than in the ice maker. — Viking Repair Denver Pros, (720) 903-2603
What it usually turns out to be
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The filter is close to spent
A cartridge that has taken everything a house can throw at it passes less and less, and the machine has no way of asking for longer. It gets what the line can deliver in its allotted seconds and freezes that, which produces a smaller cube every batch. Ice shrinking gradually over a season, rather than overnight, is this one almost every time.
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The valve is weak or partly blocked
The water inlet valve meters by time, not by volume, so anything that slows the flow through it shows up as a shortfall in the mould. A silted inlet screen, a diaphragm that no longer opens fully, or a coil that is tired will all still let something past — which is exactly why the symptom is thin ice rather than none.
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The shut-off was never fully opened
The valve that feeds the refrigerator gets closed whenever someone works under the sink, and it does not always get opened all the way again afterwards. A quarter-turn short is invisible in a glass of water from the tap and obvious in the ice bin a week later. Worth ruling out before any part is discussed.
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Ice is narrowing the fill tube
Once cubes come up short, the trickle left behind can freeze in the short run the water takes and narrow it further, which makes the next batch smaller again. That is why this symptom tends to slide towards no ice at all rather than settling. A hollow shell with a soft centre usually means the fill stopped partway.
What that means for your kitchen
The temptation here is to fit a new ice maker, and it is the one change that reliably alters nothing: a fresh module fills for exactly as long as the old one did and freezes exactly as little water. Sort out what reaches the mould and the cube size follows.
Follow-up questions
Are hollow or undersized cubes safe to use?
They are ordinary ice, frozen from the same water, so nothing about them is unsafe. What they are is a warning: the supply has been dropping for a while, and the same shortfall that thins a cube will eventually stop the batch. Deal with it while you still have ice rather than after.
Will a new filter fix it on its own?
Often it does, and it is the sensible first move because it is cheap and you can do it yourself. If the cubes come back full size within a day or two, that was the whole story. If they do not, the flow is being lost further back, and Viking Repair Denver Pros can measure it on the $89 visit, (720) 903-2603.
Parts usually involved
These are the components tested on this symptom, in the order they get tested.
- Written by
- Clifford Nakamura
- Role
- Service technician — controls and intermittent faults
- Last checked