Help! My GE Adora Refrigerator DFE29JSDASS is Leaking Water

The other afternoon I noticed a pool of water on the floor in front of my refrigerator.  It wasn’t huge and my first thought was that some ice had fallen from the dispenser on the door and melted, which would not be out of the realm of feasibility.  I wiped it up and made a mental note to keep an eye on it.   Sure enough, a couple mornings later I went into the kitchen and there it was, another pool of water.  Hmm, I thought, this is a problem that’s probably not going to go away.

I rolled the fridge out and checked the hose connections.  Bone dry.  No indication of a leaky water hose or ice maker supply line, at least not on the outside of the fridge or on the floor in the back.  Opened the freezer drawer on the bottom and no indications of water inside and really no way water could be leaking out of that.  A little Googling didn’t yield a lot of information about this particular model, which has been discontinued (of course, right?), but the good news is that some of the general information I found online helped me to fix the problem for free.

For me this was a classic case of a clogged drainage hose and said hoses were surprisingly easy to access.

Rolling the refrigerator out enough to access the rear back panel, the drainage hoses are the 2 plastic ones in the middle of the picture.  The panel is easily removed with a screwdriver.  The hoses drain into the drain pan (a part that is no longer available through Sears Parts Direct so unless is broken, don’t try to remove it!) and when they get clogged up, the water that would normally drain out finds it’s way onto the floor.  The hoses can be gently pulled free at the top, including the black rubber cuff holding them on.

 

Here I’ve removed the hoses and you can see that the black cuffs detach.  This is where my problem was.  The cuff has a thin slit allowing water to flow and in my case had some debris material that had lodged in place blocking the slit.

 

 

I was able to dig out the grossness with a toothpick.  You have to ask, “how does that get into the water line inside the fridge anyway?!”

Check both of the hoses to make sure they are clean and then re-attach them to the fridge.  The hoses are not very flexible, so you’ll need to gently work with them, bending them slightly to get them back in place.

Re-attach the back panel, plug your fridge back in and you’re done.  I couldn’t believe it was that simple and kept my fridge out in the middle of the kitchen for about a week with a big sheet of plastic underneath, but there was no need.  This fixed it.  Unless you have a cracked water valve or some kind of internal pump failure, this is likely your problem if you’ve got similar symptoms.

I hope this helped you fix your dishwasher and save a few bucks.  Here are a couple links you might also find helpful:

GE article on repairing a clogged drain – http://products.geappliances.com/appliance/gea-support-search-content?contentId=21865

Sears Parts Direct (with diagrams) – https://www.searspartsdirect.com/model-number/dfe29jsdass/0432/0161000.html