---
title: "Changing the Water Filter, and Why the Ice Changed Too"
description: "An Electrolux refrigerator water filter past its life gives slow water and hollow ice at the same time. One restriction, one fix — and run several quarts through afterwards."
url: "https://electroluxmiami.support/blog/changing-the-refrigerator-water-filter/"
date_modified: "2026-09-11"
Category: "Maintenance & Prevention"
---


# Changing the Water Filter, and Why the Ice Changed Too

An Electrolux refrigerator water filter is the one maintenance item these cabinets do remind you about, and the reminder is less useful than people assume.

## Two complaints, one cause

People call about slow water. Separately, weeks later, they call about ice that has gone small or hollow.

They are the same restriction.

The ice mold is filled by a valve that opens for a **fixed number of seconds**, and the harvest runs on a schedule regardless of how much water actually arrived in that time. Restrict the supply anywhere upstream and the mold gets a short fill, freezes a shell around an empty middle, and drops something that looks like ice and is mostly air.

So a hollow cube is not a mystery. It is a measurement, and a rather precise one.

## The ten-second test

Put a measuring jug under the dispenser and run it for ten seconds.

That single number tells you almost everything before anybody opens anything. Noticeably less than you would expect, and the ice and the water are sharing one restriction — which is one visit rather than two, and very often no visit at all.

## Changing it, and the part people get wrong

Filters on these cabinets are either inside the fresh-food compartment at the top, or in the base grille, depending on the model. Both are quarter-turn fittings designed to be changed by the owner.

Then: **run several quarts through the dispenser**, not a glass.

A new filter holds air, and air in the line produces exactly the spluttering, spitting, uneven flow that people describe as a broken dispenser. Nearly every "the new filter made it worse" report is this, and it clears with volume.

Throw the first two batches of ice away as well. Judging new ice on cubes made before the fix is how people conclude nothing changed.

## What the reminder actually is

A timer. It counts elapsed time and it measures nothing at all — it does not know whether water has passed through the filter, how much, or how hard that water was.

On many models it also does not clear itself when a new filter goes in, which is where most of the confusion about it comes from. A reminder that is still lit after a change is not telling you the change failed.

Six months is the usual life. In a household that uses the dispenser heavily, or on water this hard, it is less.

## When it is not the filter

If the water is slow with a fresh filter fitted, the restriction is upstream: a shutoff barely open, a self-piercing saddle valve silted up, or a line squeezed behind a cabinet that was pushed back into its opening.

On a built-in cabinet that half of the chain is behind joinery and not reachable from the kitchen, which is the point at which this becomes a service call rather than a Saturday morning.

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**[Read full article: Changing the Water Filter, and Why the Ice Changed Too](https://electroluxmiami.support/blog/changing-the-refrigerator-water-filter/)**