A refrigerator is a quintessential home appliance that is vital for storing and preserving perishable food. The decision to buy a fridge is not an easy one as there are several factors that have to be considered before you ahead with the purchase. As with luxury fridges in general, we don’t know enough about built-ins to offer useful advice, unfortunately. LG’s warranty coverage is pretty typical for the industry now, with one year comprehensive parts and labor, and five years parts and labor for the compressor and cooling system. The company will also provide a replacement compressor for up to 10 years , though you’ll have to cover the cost of labor, which will be high.
Refrigerators over 15 years old could be costing you more than $80 per year to run. If you need a second refrigerator year-round, replace the old one with a new ENERGY STAR certified. Make sure you keep your fridge in an ambient temperature of 35 to 38 degrees Fahrenheit. On average, an old Arctic King refrigerator uses about 35% more energy than a model that has earned the ENERGY STAR. To maximize your savings, minimize the number of doors and pay attention to cool air you can feel when you shut the doors. Get honest reviews on top products & services — delivered weekly to your inbox.
Samsung has its Bespoke series, and LG has the Studio and Signature lines. In 2020, LG settled a class-action lawsuit regarding faulty compressors that may have affected up to 1.6 million fridges sold from 2014 to 2017, all of which were 33- and 36-inch-wide French-door and side-by-side models. Different brands have slightly different looks to their stainless—some are more reflective, some have more pronounced brushed-metal grooves, some are more fingerprint resistant. You can take the doors off the fridge to get a few extra inches, but there are some fridges that you just cannot get inside of certain kitchens. Our advice is based mostly on two big fact-finding projects we conducted to collect feedback from people who use refrigerators and then quantify and analyze that feedback.
A single-door fridge (like a top-freezer or bottom-freezer model), with the hinge on the opposite side from the wall, might be your best bet. We don’t have “official” recommendations for specific refrigerator models. If this were a typical Wirecutter guide, we’d highlight a handful of the “best” refrigerators that, based on our research and testing, would make the most people the happiest.
You can put a small, affordable top-freezer fridge in a big cutout meant for a humongous, expensive French-door model. Bigger fridges do tend to make people much happier than smaller ones, according to our reader survey and analysis of customer reviews. Many people buy the widest fridge that fits their space and budget and often one that’s very deep , too.
Learn more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches home products. You can even store frozen items in the compact 1/2 width freezer compartment. The chiller goes down to 27 degrees and the refrigerator can go as low as 32 degrees. Whether you need a fridge for the garage, dorm room, or office, the Whirlpool 4.3 cu. This Energy Star rated compact refrigerator has an adjustable thermostat, allowing you to have control over how cold your items stay. The fridge has a seven-can dispenser built in, and is tall enough inside to hold two-liter bottles.
The customer ratings for these models are solid and sometimes even great, though these owners are more likely than normal to complain about noise, lack of shelving, and lack of capacity. The barebones GE GTE17DTNRWW, for example, has an average rating of 4.5 stars on Home Depot’s site, beating out most side-by-side models, but a whopping 18% of recent reviewers write that it’s noisy. We also found through our survey and customer-review analysis that Whirlpool’s French-door and side-by-side reliability was similar to that of the other brands—although notably, the rate of major problems seemed especially low. As a brand, Whirlpool had the fewest complaints in our survey about truly bad reliability .
Top-freezer models are a lot more affordable and can fit really small spaces. Bottom-freezer fridges usually lack the high-end look of French-door models but have a lot of the same practical advantages. Four-door models (equal-size half-width, half-height, swing-open doors) and column designs (all-fridge no-freezer, and vice versa) have their place, too. Once you’ve nailed down a budget for your new mini fridge, you’ll next have to decide what you want to use it for.
And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. Whirlpool® small space refrigerators don’t sacrifice features like Fast Cool, an ice maker with the Fast Ice option and electronic temperature controls. These small space appliances offer many of the same features as full size fridges, but generally have smaller total capacity. An apartment fridge is designed to make efficient use of space in tight quarters like apartments, space-conscious homes, in-law suites and entertainment rooms. Samsung and LG are the only two brands to offer smart refrigerators in India, with prices going all the way up to Rs 2.5 lacs. E-commerce has made it possible to purchase refrigerators online from the comfort of your home.
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