Leak and Seal Repairs in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego

Two things put water on the floor under a built-in in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, and both are small repairs made expensive by waiting. One is a defrost drain frozen shut, which sends the melt water backwards into the cabinet until it escapes under the door. The other is the supply line to the ice maker giving way at a fitting. Houses across this inland corner of San Diego County sit on slab, which changes where that water goes. There is no crawlspace and no basement for it to disappear into, so it travels sideways along the concrete under the cabinet base, and the first casualty is usually the toe kick or the bottom of the run next door rather than the floor directly in front of the unit. By the time anything is visible from the kitchen, the water has been somewhere for a while.

What this covers in Rancho Bernardo

This covers defrost drains frozen shut, drain heaters, evaporation trays, the supply run from the wall shutoff to the inlet valve, and the door gaskets on every cold cabinet in the kitchen. What the water looks like narrows it quickly. Clear water pooling toward the front is usually the plumbing. Cloudy water with ice sitting on the freezer floor is the drain. Condensation forming along the edge of a door and running down is the gasket, and that third one gets mistaken for the other two constantly, because by the time it reaches the tile it looks the same as either.

• Defrost drain traced from the evaporator through to the tray, flushed and cleared rather than probed
• Drain heater checked on the models that carry one
• Evaporation tray inspected, cleaned and reseated
• Every fitting from the shutoff to the inlet valve, saddle valves on older installs included
• Inlet valve body checked for weeping while under pressure
• Gasket magnet pull and door alignment on all four sides
• Toe kick and neighboring cabinet base checked for water that has already traveled

The supply line is where the age of the house shows up again. In the older Rancho Bernardo tracts the ice maker feed was often added long after the kitchen was built, run in soft copper and tapped in with a saddle valve, and that combination has one very specific habit: it weeps slowly at the tap for months before it does anything obvious. A weep behind a unit fitted flush into cabinetry has nowhere to announce itself. It runs down the wall, across the slab, and under the base of the cabinet alongside, and what the owner eventually notices is a swollen kick panel or a dark line at the bottom of a door two cabinets over. If you have found either of those with no standing water anywhere, that is still a leak, and it is worth a call the same day.

OEM parts, or an authorized supplier when the factory part is unavailable, and one price agreed before the work starts. Call (858) 630-4145 and tell us what the appliance is doing.