Common fault
Why is there water under my refrigerator?
Short answer
There are only two places the water under an Encinitas built-in can be coming from, and both are small repairs that get expensive the longer they run.
Why we start there
Either the defrost drain has frozen shut, so the melt-water has nowhere to go and backs up inside the cabinet, or a fitting on the ice maker's water line has given up somewhere out of sight. What you see tells us which. Cloudy water with ice on the freezer floor is the drain. Clean water at the toe kick with the freezer normal is the supply side. In the older Encinitas houses where the built-in was retrofitted into a remodeled kitchen, that supply fitting is usually behind closed cabinetry, so it has been weeping for a while before anything reaches the floor.
What happens next
The defrost drain fault is the one that is easy to misread. The cycle runs exactly as designed, melts the ice off the evaporator on schedule, and then has nowhere to send the water because the drain line has iced or, on a retrofitted column in an Old Encinitas kitchen, was pinched when the cabinetry closed around it. The water refreezes on the next cycle, the ice grows across the freezer floor, and eventually it finds the door. Clearing and proving the drain path is the repair, and it is done in place.
The supply-side fault is a plumbing failure inside a refrigerator. A saddle valve, a compression fitting or the tubing itself gives up, usually slowly, and the water follows the cabinet base out toward the toe kick. If the freezer looks normal and the water is clear, that is where we start, and it is why the phone call is worth making the same day rather than the same week.
If that matches what yours is doing, say so when you call — it decides which parts come on the van.
Reviews
What Encinitas customers say
Clean water kept showing up at the toe kick in our Cardiff kitchen and the freezer looked totally normal, so I was picturing the worst. It was a fitting on the ice maker line that had been weeping behind the closed-up cabinetry. Came out the morning I called. Floor was already soft, unfortunately.
I had more or less decided to replace the whole thing, it is a 700 series and it has been in this house a long time. He talked me out of it. Evaporator fan on the fridge side plus a tired gasket, and the panel matches cabinets nobody makes anymore.
Our Wolf oven was running a good twenty degrees under whatever I set it to, which I only worked out after ruining two batches of bread. He checked it against his own probe, ordered the sensor and came back to fit it the following week. Bakes right now.
Rated 4.9 from 594 customer reviews.
Appliance down in Encinitas?
Tell us the brand and what it is doing — we can usually name the likely repair before we arrive.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
It is late and our refrigerator has gone warm. Will anyone in Encinitas actually answer?
Yes. The line is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. Whether a technician reaches you that night or first thing depends on where the work already sits and whether the part is on board, and you hear which on the call, not a window nobody can keep. Same-day service in Encinitas where the schedule allows.