Why is there water under my refrigerator?

What is actually going on

Clear water pooling at the front while the appliance has been sitting quiet points at the plumbing: the supply line, the saddle valve, or a compression fitting on the feed to the ice maker or dispenser. Water that looks cloudy, arriving alongside a sheet of ice across the freezer floor, is the opposite fault. There the drain below the evaporator has frozen shut, so every defrost cycle sends its melt somewhere it was not meant to go and it finds its way out under the door. Both repairs are small. The damage underneath them is not, and on travertine, stone or hardwood laid over slab it overtakes the cost of the repair within days.

What we check, and in what order

The drain side is the more common of the two here, and San Diego water is part of the reason. The supply is largely imported and it is not soft. Mineral scale collects at the inlet valve screen, in the fill tube and along the drain path, and a drain that is already partly restricted freezes closed the first time a defrost cycle runs slightly long. Clearing it is straightforward. Leaving it is not: the trough overflows every cycle, and the water that reaches the subfloor is the part nobody sees until the flooring lifts at a seam.

Second homes are the expensive version of this fault. A second home that sits empty for a season still has a refrigerator running the whole time with nobody in the room. A weeping compression fitting or a blocked drain then runs unattended for weeks. If you own a property that is unoccupied for long stretches, two things are worth doing: have the drain path and the water fittings checked between stays, and know where the shutoff for the refrigerator line actually is before you need it.

If that matches what yours is doing, say so when you call — it decides which parts come on the van.