About this site

Ice Maker Guide is an independent comparison site for ice makers sold in Australia. It exists because there was no Australian site doing it: search for the best nugget ice maker here and Google returns two American magazines, a Facebook post, a Reddit thread and four retailers trying to sell you something.

How the figures get here

Every specification on this site comes from a manufacturer specification sheet or a retailer product listing, and every one carries a link to that source and the date it was read. That is a deliberately modest claim and it is worth stating clearly, because a lot of sites in this category imply hands-on testing they have not done.

Three conventions follow from it, and they explain most of what looks unusual on the pages that follow.

• "Not published" means not published. It is recorded as a value, not left blank. In this category the absences are informative: manufacturers publish output in kilograms per 24 hours almost universally and publish a noise rating almost never, and noise is what people complain about.
• Prices are per retailer, not per product. The same physical machine is routinely sold by four retailers at four prices, sometimes several hundred dollars apart. Collapsing those into one number would destroy the most useful comparison on the site, so one model can legitimately appear four times.
• Nothing is converted. All prices are Australian dollars as listed. Where a manufacturer publishes output in pounds per day rather than kilograms per 24 hours we record the kilogram field as not published and keep the original figure in the notes, rather than converting and presenting the result as though it were the published spec.

The claim we are most careful about

The word "nugget" is the most abused term in this category. Nugget ice is the soft chewable ice from a hospitality machine, and it is what most people are actually searching for. A large share of machines sold in Australia as nugget ice makers produce hollow bullet ice, which is a completely different product made by a completely different mechanism.

So this site does not classify ice type from the product name or the marketing copy. Where we state what a machine makes, that comes from the specification and the product imagery, and where the listing and the evidence disagree the page says so and shows why. If we cannot establish it, the field says not established rather than repeating the seller's word for it.

How the site makes money, precisely

This matters more here than on most comparison sites, because the majority of the traffic to this site lands on pages about retailers that pay us nothing at all.

Programs we have applied to

• Kitchen Warehouse via Commission Factory at a stated 5-10% (unverified). Not approved yet, so no link on this site currently earns anything.
• Appliances Online via Partnerize at a rate that is not published outside the network. Not approved yet, so no link on this site currently earns anything.

Retailers with no affiliate program at all

Kmart, Harvey Norman, Big W, The Good Guys, Kogan, Aldi, Bunnings, Amazon AU. These pay us nothing and no arrangement is pending with any of them. We cover them because they are what Australians search for and because, quite often, the right machine for someone is one of theirs.

What we will not do

• Present an estimate as a measurement, or a review consensus as a specification.
• Publish a photograph of a product that we generated rather than photographed.
• Reorder a comparison table because of commission. The retailers that pay us are named above; check any table against that list.
• Claim independence from a manufacturer while taking money from one. We take money from two multi-brand retailers, which is a different relationship, and it is disclosed.

Corrections

Prices in this category move weekly and specifications get quietly revised. If a figure here is wrong, it is worth more to us to fix it than to leave it, because a register nobody can trust is worth nothing. Every figure carries the date it was checked so you can see for yourself how stale it is.

Ice Maker Guide Australia is published from Queensland, Australia.

Common questions

Do you test these machines yourselves?

Not yet, and the site says so on every page rather than implying otherwise. Everything published today is sourced from manufacturer specifications and retailer listings, each with a link and the date it was checked. Where we have measured something ourselves we will label it as measured and publish the method. Until then, treating a spec sheet as a spec sheet is the honest option.

Why do you cover retailers that pay you nothing?

Because that is what people search for. "Kmart ice maker" alone is roughly 9,900 searches a month in Australia, far more than any manufacturer name. Answering it well and then saying plainly that Kmart pays us nothing is more useful than pretending the question does not exist, and a Kmart shopper can walk into a store and check us either way.

How do you decide what to recommend?

On fit for a stated situation: how much ice you need, whether it has to travel, what noise you can live with, and what you are prepared to spend. Where the best answer for a situation is a machine we earn nothing from, the page says that. Commission has never changed the order of a comparison table on this site and if it ever does, the site has stopped being worth reading.

Why do so many specifications say "not published"?

Because they are not published. Decibel ratings are the clearest case: almost no manufacturer in this category publishes one, even though noise is the most common complaint in retailer reviews. We could estimate from reviews and present it as data. We do not, because an invented number that looks precise is worse than an honest blank.