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Best Price Cheap NewAir AI-210SS Portable Ice Maker With HighQuality Stainless Steel Finish Discount Review Shop

If I was rating this ice machine purely on meeting advertised performance it would get a five, but I feel that I have to take one off for design. As advertised, it makes ice quickly and reliably. We use it in our bar/theater room, most generally for a few hours in the evening about three times a week.

What’s not evident from any of the sales literature is that the machine works by pumping water up from a lower reservoir to the freezing tray in the top. The tray dumps the ice into a basket above the reservoir. As the cubes melt, the water drops back down into the reservoir to be reused. As you use ice, the water level in the reservoir drops. There’s no cooler for the ice compartment, just the one that runs the freeze tube during an ice making cycle. If you leave the machine on all the time, it cycles every few hours as the ice cubes sitting in the basket melt down enough to trigger the low ice sensor. That means that you either leave the machine on all the time or you have to plan a party about half an hour ahead of time in order to have any ice on hand. It takes about an hour and a half of continuous running in order to fill the ice bin. The machine, while not overly loud, makes too much noise to be left on during movies. A full hopper is good for about half a dozen full size mixed drinks; each cycle is good enough for about one and a half to two drinks depending on how much ice you like. As some have noted, there’s a strong plastic smell about the unit similar to how the inside of a new refrigerator smells. I was put off at first until I discovered that the ice cubes didn’t have any plastic flavor to them. It stands to reason that that if you can smell the plasticizers than they are in the water as well but I couldn’t detect it. No idea whether the plastic compound in question is the suspect Bisphenol A that has everyone tossing their plastic water bottles. In any case, the smell is fading over time which means that there’s less of whatever it is causing the smell in the water.

What it needs, and doesn’t have, is an internal clock to turn it on at a certain time every day. That way it could start making ice in the afternoon and be ready by evening. Instead it has a timer that can be set to count down a certain number of hours and minutes before it starts. That means that you have to know ahead of time if there’s going to be a gathering and you have to remember to go to the machine and set it to start counting down. That’s often pointless because it’s already evening and you need it to start making ice right away.

An external timer’s no good either. The control panel is computerized rather than hard switched so it resets to off when external power is removed.

A quirk to be aware of is that you can’t put ultra pure water in the machine. It relies on a certain amount of minerals in the water to provide conductivity for the proper functioning of the water level sensor. If you put in ultra pure water in the attempt to get perfect ice that won’t impart flavors to your drink, the machine will just sit there thinking it’s low on water.

In short, good ice at a good price. It’s just a shame that all the computing power of the front panel is wasted by not having a clock programmed in.

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