How Long Does a Nugget Ice Maker Take?

What 1.6 pounds an hour means in glasses

At roughly half a pound per tall glass, 1.6 lbs an hour is about three glasses an hour, or one glass every twenty minutes, from a machine already at temperature.

Note the last row. The bin holds 3 lbs, so anything beyond that means emptying it into the freezer as it fills. That workflow is on do countertop ice makers keep ice frozen.

Everyone else publishes a daily rate only

Which is much less useful, because a daily rating describes a machine running flat out into an empty bin for 24 hours — a scenario that never happens in a kitchen, since the bin fills and the machine stops.

You can divide a daily figure by 24 to get a nominal hourly rate: Frigidaire's 20 kg a day is about 1.8 lbs an hour on that arithmetic, and the original Opal's 24 lbs is about 1 lb an hour. That division is ours, not the manufacturers', and it assumes a constant rate the manufacturers do not claim. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a spec.

What actually slows a machine down

1. Scale on the freezing cylinder. The most common cause of a machine that used to be faster. Scale insulates the surface that has to move heat, so cycles get longer. Fix: descale it.
2. A warm room. The original Opal manual specifies 55F to 90F. Near the top of that range, the machine is fighting the room and the ice melts as fast as it arrives.
3. Warm water in the reservoir. The machine must remove heat from the water. Warm water means more heat to remove. Cold water in is faster, and no, warm water does not freeze quicker.
4. Blocked clearance. Every manual asking for 3 to 4 inches is describing how heat leaves. Blocked ventilation means longer cycles and higher running cost.
5. Low water. A pump drawing air rather than water makes no ice and, per GE's own notes, is louder while doing it.

Cold starts

From switch-on, the machine has to bring the freezing cylinder down to temperature before any ice forms. That time is not published by anyone and it varies with room and water temperature, so we are not putting a number on it.

What follows practically: if you want ice at seven, switch the machine on before six rather than at ten to seven. And if you want ice for a gathering, start the day before and harvest into the freezer, because no machine here holds more than about 3 lbs at once.

If nothing arrives at all

That is a different problem from slow, and it has a checklist: nugget ice maker not making ice. The most common causes are a missing internal baffle, a blocked hot air outlet, a room over 90F and low water — all four of which Frigidaire lists in its own troubleshooting section.