The door of this apartment or dorm room-sized fridge has a cubby for your soda cans and a space for two-liter bottles or milk. A drawer gives you a great place for your fruits and veggies while the shelving is just the right size for your other necessities. Don’t forget about keeping some treats in the freezer for late-night snacks or study sessions. When you’re using a mini fridge for snacks and beverages in your dorm room or home office, you want something small. Since this is a convenience item, affordability is also important.
If it’s above 5 degrees F, the freezer’s not reliable for long term food storage. They don’t keep foods at a set temperature but rather change in relationship to the room condition. When it’s very warm, they don’t cool to an acceptable level for food safety.
Its freezer performance wasn’t much better, hovering around 5°F instead of 0°F. While this isn’t ideal, the one saving grace is that its freezer temps were stable. Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions Arctic King on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. We updated this story in May 2023 to ensure all tested and vetted picks were available, in stock and correctly priced. Some of these small refrigerators even come with their own freezers.
If you find yourself in constant awe at how fast your fridge fills up, it may be time to consider investing in some extra real estate with a mini fridge. These compact appliances can suit any space and still have ample room to comfortably house everything from extra soda cans and wine bottles to leftovers and groceries. They’re ideal for kitchens, garages, dorm Frigidaire fridge rooms, bedrooms, and offices. This mini fridge from Whirlpool sells for under $200, making it a great choice for anyone who has to stick to a modest budget when shopping. It features both a refrigerator and a freezer section, each with its own door, so you can chill drinks or store extra groceries and even make extra ice for gatherings with family and friends.
The Smeg Mini Refrigerator is an Italian-made, 1950s-inspired mini fridge that comes in a variety of colors (black, white, red, cream and orange). We love the sturdy handle, which makes the unit Frigidaire fridge easy to open, and the adjustable door bins, which are perfect for fitting taller bottles. Take note that while the hinge is not reversible, you can choose a left or right hinge when you order.
Installation is arguably the most important step to the process as there are several details that an untrained installer can overlook. In fact, some of our manufacturers go as far as to add an extra year of warranty to their products if you have them installed by one of their certified installers! We want to make sure you have years of trouble-free service, so we highly recommend coordinating with one of recommended third party installation firms.
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 interior glass shelf is adjustable for space optimizing, and the interior light helps you make sure you grab the right item out of the fridge. This eco-friendly solution is the perfect fit for your compact fridge needs. For full-size refrigerators and mini fridges, we rate the ability to regulate temperature and humidity for grocery list staples like lettuce, deli meat and frozen foods.
If you are set on a mini fridge, consider that it might be wise not to spend too much because of the shorter lifespan. Our recommendations above run the gamut of what we found (based on research and expert interviews) to be a reasonable price range. Note that if you do use this fridge as a freezer, you’ll want to be hypervigilant about condensation and be sure to get a good seal every time you open and close the door. This is basically destined to be a problem with most similar models, so it’s important to understand that you’re working with a very small, very inexpensively built appliance. Its shelves and bins were more or less identical to what we saw elsewhere.