CONTROLLING Craziness: How to Clean your Refrigerator's Ice Maker

Monday, January 13, 2014

How to Clean your Refrigerator's Ice Maker

I don't know what prompted me to look inside our refrigerator's ice maker with a flashlight last week, but I did. I was not prepared for what I saw. It was gross and I refused to use the ice maker / water dispenser until it was clean and mold free. Yes, there was mold in there, Ewwww! In fact the next day I sent the kids off to school without any ice in their water bottles.

And once the kids were off to school, I was determined to clean it. My husband told me to use bleach and a toothbrush to scrub it out. Well, I did and couldn't get it all. So I searched the Internet for how to clean an ice maker and discovered this blog post by Gina over at The Shabby Creek Cottage, where she so willingly posted pictures of her moldy ice maker. So I'm not going to show you mine. She had a very easy solution too. Much easier than trying to get into every nook and cranny with a toothbrush, or cotton swab. And much safer than using bleach, which I'm not sure is even good for the fridge parts.

So how did I easily clean all the mold and gunk off my ice maker......I used my little Bissell Steam 'N Clean. (It's similar to this one on amazon.com - affiliate link -) I used it in the past, to clean my shower, and it worked so I thought I'd give it a try again. If you want to see how I cleaned the rusty red water stains out of my shower check out THIS blog post.

Here is the after. It's hard to tell but the white circle at the top which hold the ice back, had black mold on it. So gross, but now so clean. I'm not sure the ice ever came in contact with the mold but I didn't want to take any chances.

Here's an ever closer look.

And it was so easy. I just shoved the end of my little steam cleaner up the ice dispenser and let the steam do the work, turning it to make sure I got all the angles.