ApplianceGeneral Electric Refrigerator
ModelHSS25GFPJWW
Level of DifficultyEasy
Time to do repairMore than 2 hours
Age of Appliance1 - 4 years
Tools
Pliers
Nutdriver
From Google to PartsSelect. Reading the forum, the consensus was that to fix the nonworking dispensers the main refrigerator motherboard had to be replaced. I ordered it which is easy to do because the diagrams show all the parts clearly. Great website. I also ordered the front trim piece because I had snapped one of the prongs holding it on. They arrived quickly. The trim just snaps on the front which takes a few seconds. The motherboard which is just a circuit board, even came with replacement instructions. It takes a few minutes to wheel the refrigerator out, then take off the back panel (3 screws), unplug all the connectors, unsnap the circuit board, snap the new one in, plug the connectors in, reattach the back panel, and wheel the refrigerator back to the wall.
The water dispenser promptly froze up. To make sure that it is not the solenoid valve, unhook the water hose under the freezer door. Pressing in the water dispenser should pump water out of the hose onto the floor. It did for me. Since there is only plastic tubing after that, it has to be clogged with ice. I took a thermocouple, inserted the wire into the water dispenser outlet, it would only go in about 3 inches and displayed 31 F. I took a plastic funnel which slipped onto the end of the outlet and used a blow dryer to heat up the outlet a lot several times. Eventually the ice unfroze and it has been working ever since. I think if this happens again, I'll get a cheap aquarium aerator to pump air, for the hours it might take, through a thin tube (using wire insulation) to the frozen spot to melt the ice.
While the refrigerator was away from the wall, I took off the screws holding the large bottom panel in the back off. This exposes the condenser cooling which visually needed to be cleaned off with a vacuum cleaner. After doing this, it seemed to make the refrigerator run much more efficiently.
The refrigerator has been working perfectly for past month and it makes me so happy.