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1. ITT (Flojet) also makes a “dual” bottled water system which allows you to connect two five gallon water bottles at the same time. They call this the “Dual Inlet Bottled Water Dispensing System” and the model number is BW1020A. If you intend to run both the refrigerator’s icemaker and water dispenser and you use a lot of water, consider the dual system. I bought the dual inlet model instead and I’m glad I did, we go through a lot of bottled water since we can’t really drink the well water here…

2. In our house, the kitchen shares a wall with the garage, and we were able to easily drill a hole and run the 1/4″ line through the wall – this keeps the Flojet pump in a different room and makes changing the bottled water easier since we store it in the garage anyway. If you have the opportunity to setup your system this way, I highly recommend it. Having the pump in a different room is important because the pump is loud when running, and since the icemaker will kick in and out at various times it is nice to have the pump located elsewhere. I don’t think I would be happy with this solution if the pump had to be inside the kitchen since the noise would be a real problem.

3. Since virtually every refrigerator with a water connection uses the 1/4″ tubing line, and since this unit includes 20′ of 1/4″ tubing, you don’t really need anything to connect this to a refrigerator except for a 1/4″ tubing union, which is not included. You could get one at your local hardware store, but Amazon has them and they are Prime eligible, here is the link: Celcon Acetal Copolymer “Push to Connect” Tubing Connector – Union Connector , 1/4″. These are the easiest possible connectors to use, just push the tubing in on both sides and you’re done. Here is another example of a 1/4″ union: JACO Bulkhead Union – 1/4 inch Tube O.D. Female x 1/4 inch Tube O.D. Female just in case that one is gone…

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The instructions recommend a sanitation process with some household bleach and a bucket of water, which I performed. Installation was very simple, as it basically consists of connecting the pump to your fridge, placing the dip tube in a bottle of water, and plugging in the pump. I got lucky in that the water tube built into my fridge was long enough to reach the pump where I wanted to install it, so I just plugged it into the pump. (The fridge tubing and the pump outlet were the same size.) If I’d had to use some of the tubing included with the pump that would have required a trip to the hardware store to get a connector to join the two.

Flojet recommends/requires that you remove any filter in your fridge, they say it will damage the pump if you have one. Not that you’d probably want to filter your bottled water anyway. Conveniently when I removed the filter from my fridge it bypassed itself automatically and just let the water go through. The instructions say that you might be able to get a blank filter from your fridge manufacturer if that’s not the case with your fridge. You could test this in advance, just pull the filter from your fridge and see if you can still dispense water.

The dip tube is sized for 5 gallon bottles, we have 3 gallon bottles delivered so the tube is a bit longer than we need and sticks out of the top of the bottle a ways. There’s unfortunately no way to shorten it, as the top and bottom fittings are glued on.

And the pump is a bit loud. In our case it is sitting on the counter beside the fridge, I imagine if we could put it in a cabinet it wouldn’t be so noticeable. During the day when the house is active it’s not too bad, but at night when the house is quiet it seems rather loud.

Overall I’m quite happy. It’s nice to have ice that tastes good and one less appliance taking up space and power in the kitchen.
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