My refrigerator also has as a through the door water dispenser like yours. Inside the refrigerator behind the bottom produce drawer there is a large coil of plastic tubing that is designed to pre-cool the water that is delivered to the door spigot.
You should check your refrigerator to see if it also has this same tubing arrangement. It is entirely possible that the previous owner of the refrigerator had left vegetables in the drawer for such a long time that they became severely spoiled and contaminated this tubing. Contamination could also have happened if spoiled food was on a shelf and decay liquids ran down the back wall into the tubing area. If the lower drawer was cracked and leaked out into the bottom of the refrigerator this problem could have been even worse.
If your refrigerator has this system I would highly recommend that you simply replace this coil of tubing with new.
Residential Kitchen
In a dwelling unit (residential), GFCI protection is only required for kitchen receptacles that serve the countertop surfaces. There's no requirement to GFCI protect receptacles that serve a refrigerator. Unless the fridge is plugged into a countertop receptacle.
National Electrical Code 2014
Chapter 2 Wiring and Protection
Article 210 Branch Circuits
I. General Provisions
210.8 Ground-Fault Circuit-Interrupter Protection for Personnel. Ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection for personnel shall be provided as required in 210.8(A) through (C). The ground-fault circuit-interrupter shall be installed in a readily accessible location.
(A) Dwelling Units. All 125-volt, single-phase, 15- and
20-ampere receptacles installed in the locations specified in
210.8(A)(1) through (10) shall have ground-fault circuit interrupter protection for personnel.
(6) Kitchens— where the receptacles are installed to serve the countertop surfaces.
Garages, Unfinished Basement, and Other Locations
If the refrigerator is in a garage, boathouse, or unfinished basement. All the receptacles are required to be GFCI protected, so the fridge will have to be plugged into a GFCI protected receptacle.
Why does the fridge trip the GFCI?
Any inductive load when switched off, can produce electromagnetic interference (EMI). This interference can, and often does, trip GFCI devices. Most vapor compression refrigerators have a few inductive loads, any of which could cause the trip.
Is there anything that can be done?
There are devices called snubbers that can be used to reduce, or eliminate the effects of EMI. Installing one between the fridge and the GFCI device, could prevent nuisance trips. The best solution though, is to connect the fridge to a non-GFCI protected circuit.
If that's all it takes, why isn't there already one built in?
While most (all) manufacturers are aware that refrigerators can cause nuisance tripping of GFCI devices, most (none) seem willing to provide a solution. It would be complete speculation for me to try and tell you why they don't care, so of course I'll go through a few possibilities.
- Cost.
Plain and simple, it costs money to implement a solution.
- Warranties and Operating Conditions.
Most refrigerators are designed to operate in a kitchen. Running them in dusty, dirty garages and basements could lead to more warranty covered repairs.
Best Answer
DO NOT USE THAT RECEPTACLE UNTIL IT IS EXAMINED CLOSELY BY QUALIFIED PERSONNEL
What you likely have with that poor, maligned GFCI is a situation called a "reverse polarity bootleg ground", where neutral and ground are both connected to the incoming hot and hot is connected to the incoming neutral. This situation is extremely dangerous, even on a GFCI protected circuit, as the miswired ground puts the chassis of whatever's plugged into it at 120V in a way that cannot be disconnected by the GFCI receptacle.
What you can do to test for this is use a non-contact voltage detector -- place its business end next to the receptacle but not in the slots. If the receptacle ground is live -- this means that the entire receptacle mounting yoke is hot at 120VAC and will set off the voltage detector. On a normal receptacle, this won't happen -- the only way to get the detector to go off is to stick the tip in the hot slot on the receptacle.
If that's the case, then you'll need to have the bootlegged "ground" removed (it may be upstream of the receptacle and quite hard to find) and the receptacle polarity corrected as well. If the receptacle comes up clean, then I'd use the non-contact voltage detector to check the copper water pipe -- if that's hot, then there's a bonding problem and an equipment fault, which is a combination you'll want a qualified electrician to fix. (Not the least because trying to fix that DIY puts you at even more risk of the 60 cycle shuffle than you're already at!)