Looking to past performance also can’t account for changes in the way refrigerators are currently manufactured. We’ve learned from talking to manufacturers and touring appliance factories that components and processes and employees can change as often as every few weeks, yet the product’s model name remains the same. In other words, today’s fridge might not be exactly the same product as last month’s fridge, and there can be bad batches. You can spend a lot more than $4,000 on a fridge if you’d like to. At these high prices, you can find plenty of notable brands, some of which are sub-labels of the major brands, like JennAir , Monogram , Thermador and Gaggenau (both under Bosch’s parent company, BSH), and Dacor .
This allows you to keep an eye on your inventory and not have to stand there with the door open while fishing around or deciding what you want. As we mentioned earlier, the longer and more often you open your mini fridge door, the more you overwork the poor little built-in compressor, and the faster you shorten the appliance’s life. GE’s whirlpool mini refrigerator 3.1-Cubic-Foot mini fridge has a separate freezer and plenty of smartly-designated space for cans, food, and more. Normally $190, currently $150 which is pretty good for a 4.3 cubic foot mini fridge with a freezer compartment too (0.5 cubic feet). A mini fridge can absolutely be worth the cost, especially if you’re going off to college.
Mini Fridge with Top Freezer has an interior light for spotting exactly what you need inside. Emily Belfiore is a Buying Guides writer for Meredith brands including InStyle, People, Food & Wine, and more. Always in pursuit of the best reviewer-vouched products, she covers topics spanning across the fashion, beauty, and health and wellness verticals. In her free time, you can find her testing products for articles, watching beauty tutorials, or catching up on the latest binge-worthy show. Take a look at your school’s housing policy to find out what dimensions are acceptable (many schools require ones that are 5 cubic feet or smaller, though some max out at 3.5 feet).
All of Whirlpool’s freestanding refrigerators were transitioned to the climate-friendly R600a refrigerant by the end of 2021. Senior staff writer Liam McCabe has covered home appliances since 2011, including a stint at Reviewed, and has worked on whirlpool mini refrigerator versions of this Wirecutter guide since 2014. Skip to content HUGE SALE – 50% off all retail items online and in-store. If that does not help, clean the inside of the unit by following the cleaning instructions included in the owner’s manual.
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 Frigidaire fridge 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 .
As of early 2021, new LG refrigerators all use climate-friendly R600a refrigerant. Take multiple measurements of your space to find the maximum width, depth, and height. Seriously—take multiple measurements of each dimension in case your floors turn out to be crooked.