Gevi Household Nugget Ice Maker GIMN 1000

I had a nice and fancy ice maker that came with the house. Some nice GE one, and it broke last year. So I went to Walmart and found a $100 FABERWARE one, which was alright, BUT… YOU KNOW… produced maybe 1pt of ice at a time. This does like 4x more. Where I can put some in my dog’s water bowl, have more than enough to put in my large cup, and still have some left over. My one dog LOVES ice, and this is a good size for her. Was easy to set up, and works as intended. THOUGH, DO NOT PLACE ANYTHING ON TOP OF IT, that lid is flimsy as can be and the fan is right there.

All in all, I would say don’t buy, especially if you have a stand alone ice maker, should give the GE guy a call again and have him work on that one more time, since I don’t think the ice maker is as old as the fridge was. At $500 US, you can literally buy a more “COMMERCIAL” solution than this. It looks nice, and I wouldn’t have entertained the idea of buying this if it weren’t for the $150 coupon that was on offer. EVEN THEN at $350, it’s a hard pill to swallow. I want to say, looking up my model number for the ice maker it was like $700 and does like 5x as much as this, but at a slower rate. IT has worked well in the near month I had it in operation. It’s not quiet, but it’s also not obnoxious.

(for ice maker with window) When we first got this ice maker it was great except for one thing. When the water level was low it would do this loud squealing as if something needed oil. During a conference call this squealing was so loud I had to unplug it to get it to stop. Powering it off from the front didn’t work. Fast forward to 3 months of near blissful ice production and it STOPPED WORKIING. Turned out the pump was clogged due to the high mineral content in our water which comes from underground aquifers. I started to clean the system by first draining the existing water out and pulling the filter screen in the tank. What I noticed was lots of thin white membrane like material in the water. I also scrubbed down the lower tank with a little brush and it was extremely slimey. Nothing was growing but there was a slime coating in the lower tank. Note this model does have a UV light that kills everything that might try to grow in the upper tank. However this won’t prevent build up of all those dead micro-organisms in the lower tank and possibly in the water line within it. So cleaning this once a month is a must do. So how did I clean this machine? I started with a shot of white vinegar and running the cleaning cycle over and over again for a day. I also ordered the cleaning powder that comes in 4 packets from Gevi. As I cleaned it with vinegar I noticed that more and more those white floating membranes came down into the lower tank. After about 5 or 6 cleaning cycles I drained the water out and cleaned the screen again and made sure that the white membranes were all sucked out. I then refilled the tank, added a shot of white vinegar again and ran it again for 5 to 6 times before draining out the tank again and cleaning the screen. I did this for a total of 3 to 4 times. The next day when I got the Gevi cleaner and descaler I filled up the tank and added only about half the packet. I read a lot of reviews where they said the cleaner made the ice taste funny so I decided to only use half a packet as the packets are NOT designed for one packet one tank usage. There’s a whole mg to ml of wather conversion on these and I decided let’s just start small. After running the descaler for 5 to 6 cleaning cycles I saw a lot more white membranes floating in the lower tanks. I drained the tank one more time and then ran the ice maker with just water and nothing else for another 5 to 6 cycles. Very little white membranes came down to the lower tank. I drained the water one last time and now the machine runs like a champ. No more squealing and it runs a lot quieter. I believe when you first get this machine you should run through this cleaning exercise with either white vinegar or a descaler as there may be something left in the pipes or the pump of this machine that came from manufacturing that causes the pump to jam and stop working which is signaled first by that loud squealing noise and then the pump stopping altogether. I considered getting a commercial ice maker rather than this machine but those are much larger and for this type of ice and production speed would be closer to $1000 or more. For what I paid with the $150 coupon I still believe this machine is worth it. You MUST run only filtered water through it and you MUST clean it at least once a month with descaler or vinegar. To those that say a commercial grade ice maker is better and less trouble, I would challenge you to check the tanks and the filters on those machines and you will likely see a horror show of nastiness in those machines as well. I do think there are improvements that can be made to future models such as making the intake screen larger so that it wouldn’t jam too easily. Also to run at least one cleaning cycle through the machine before shipping. A regular light combined with a UV light at the lower tank would be great too. As it’s hard to see the water level of the tank before you accidentally over fill it. So in essence great ice maker so far and it sounds like the company stands behind their product. Now that we know we need to descale it every month or two the machine actually runs quieter and very efficiently. I looked at their competitor the GE ice maker 2.0 which now has a UV light too but for a much higher price people are complaining about the same thing with the pump jamming or disgusting buildup destroying their machines. The difference is that cleaning those machines won’t get them to work again. Still a good buy. It made my Fiancee very happy as she believes these ice nuggets are better than the ones from Chik-fila and she has 24 hour access to as much as she can eat. Hope this helps.