Water in the Bottom of a Kenmore Refrigerator Is Water It Made Itself

Kenmore refrigerator leaking water inside: it is melt water, not a leak

The word leak sends people looking for a burst pipe, and there usually is not one. Every refrigerator on this site makes water on purpose, several times a day, and has a small plumbing system of its own for getting rid of it.

Here is the path. The evaporator behind the back wall of the freezer collects frost as it works. On a schedule, a small heater melts that frost off. The melt runs down a molded channel into a drain hole at the lowest point of the freezer floor, through a tube down the back of the cabinet, and into a shallow pan sitting over the compressor, where the heat from the compressor evaporates it.

Four components, one of which is a hole about the width of a pencil. That hole is where it goes wrong.

Why it blocks here in particular

Two reasons, and this climate supplies both.

Humid air brings more water into the cabinet. Every door opening in a Miami kitchen admits air carrying far more moisture than the same door opening would in a dry climate, so there is more frost to melt and more water to drain.

Debris finds the hole. Crumbs, a peppercorn, a piece of packaging. It sits in the opening, catches the next melt, and freezes into a plug that grows.

Once it is plugged, the melt has nowhere to go but sideways — into the channel, over the lip, down the back wall and into the bottom of the fresh-food compartment, where it collects under the crisper drawers and eventually on the floor.

Clearing it

The step list above covers it, and the one caution worth repeating is temperature. Warm water, not boiling. These channels are plastic, they are cold, and boiling water into cold plastic is how a cheap job becomes an expensive one.

Work patiently. A plug that has been forming for weeks does not go in one pass, and forcing anything solid through the hole risks pushing the debris further down the tube where it is genuinely difficult to reach.

When it comes back

This is the part worth reading twice, because most people clear the drain, congratulate themselves and then find the puddle again in the spring.

A drain that blocks once is debris. Clear it and forget it.

A drain that blocks twice in a season is a symptom. Something upstream is making more melt water than the path was designed for, and there are two usual candidates. A door seal that has hardened lets warm humid air in continuously, so the evaporator frosts far more than it should. A defrost circuit that is not completing leaves ice standing where it should have melted, which also shows as frost on the back wall and a compartment that will not hold temperature.

Both of those are repairs, and both are cheaper than the third possibility, which is that ice has been sitting in the cabinet long enough to reach something it should not.

The one that is not this at all

Water on the floor outside the appliance, with the inside of the cabinet dry, is a different problem: the supply line to the ice maker or the dispenser, the valve at the back, or the pan itself.

That one does not wait for a convenient afternoon, because a supply line under pressure behind a heavy appliance can put a great deal of water into a kitchen while nobody is home. Turn the supply off at the shut-off valve and call.