Our kitchen was remodeled by the original owner, and the fridge sits in a space that is too narrow for most side by sides. The LG we found was the only one that actually fit. All the others, from any brand, were humongous. Like you needed to store food for an entire soccer team or something.
I 100% agree with this sentiment.
Side-by-sides have narrow shelves in both the fridge and freezer halves. Whatever you want is guaranteed to be behind a bunch of stuff you wanted this morning, that you have to put on the counter while you swap its spot for what you want now.
Maybe that’s the motivation behind just making them way wider. Well, that and wider = more expensive = more suburban prestige points.
Yeah, same. I use a ton of ice, so I love having an ice maker. Ours is also built into the freezer itself, not a “get ice through the door” type unit. I think those (the door type) are more prone to breaking than the ones in the freezer.
We have a water softener, so we also have an RO unit to remove sodium with a separate drinking water faucet at our kitchen sink. When it was installed, they also ran a separate line to the fridge so that filtered water goes to the ice maker, so we don’t even use the filters in the fridge… we removed it and it works just fine. That obviously doesn’t work for everyone though.
No matter what you buy now you won’t get 40 years out of it. The fridge in our garage is close to that old, but we have bought two others since then for the kitchen.
Is it really that hard to build some quality into them?
Some of the changes over the years are due to things like requiring different refrigerant, which obsoleted whole lines of refrigerators. Some of the loss of durability I’m sure has to do with changing expectations. The old fridges were basically electric ice boxes. Simple and sturdy, they had nothing more sophisticated than a light that turned on when you opened the door and turned off when you closed it. Modern appliances have so much crap in and on them, and come in so many shapes and sizes with all sorts of wonky door configurations, that it should be no surprise they don’t last as long.
We have one, and it is glorious. Ours is a Fridgidaire. We have a chest freezer in the garage.
I would not buy GE. They are using rfid tags to prevent the use of third party water filters so they can charge a fortune for replacements and force you to replace them on the schedule they choose. Of course this is irrelevant if you buy one that doesn’t make ice or dispenser water.
For an ice maker, I recommend something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YF9SGBW/ref=dp_cerb_3
I’ve never seen a refigerator ice maker that makes pellet ice (Sonic ice!) and I have an earlier model of this that sits on the countertop. I love it. I had a built-in in my house in Michigan that cost about $2000, and while my wife and I argued a lot about the cost while we were remodeling the kitchen, she later told me it was the best investment we made in that kitchen.
I don’t know if it’s hard, exactly, but I think manufacturers just don’t want to. My observation has been that anything you buy these days is meant to be “disposable”. All large and small appliances, cars, any big ticket items really, never last as long as they used to. I think the last time I had an appliance of any kind that lasted more than five years was a good 20 years ago. I was pretty upset when our trusty toaster oven that we’d had for 15 years kicked the bucket. We’ve been through at least four more sine then.
And that’s why I’m still driving my 2002 Toyota Camry. We really could do with a new car, especially one with AWD for the Maine winters, but honestly, the Camry is still going strong and I don’t really look forward to having to get something that needs to be in the shop every six months.
Kind of the story of most things nowadays. Making them do more and more, complicating them with added electronics etc has seemed to make better but shorter lasting products. We recently replaced a 17 year old washer and was told the modern washer just doesn’t last that long.
Our original microwave lasted almost 20 years, then we went thru several before the current one which has lasted 5+ years.
Cars used to be essentially immune to an EMP. They would have stalled but started again. Now they have computers.
I would not recommend a bottom freezer fridge with the ice maker in the door. We have had nothing but issues with ours. Every few months we get a big solid chunk of ice frozen on the back which I have to thaw out with a hair dryer. Had one repair come and say, “thanks but no thanks”. Then called the Sears repair service who came and said there was nothing he could do and I should just buy a new fridge.
They both complained about the design, saying it was dumb to put an ice maker in the refrigerator compartment because eventually the seals will go and you are screwed.
The door ice eventually broke completely, luckily the freezer compartment has an ice maker as well so at least we have ice. I think we will be replacing with a standard side-by-side eventually. I also don’t recommend Frigidaire, we bought our house around 3 years ago, appliances had a few years on them but have already had to replace microwave, dishwasher, and fridge soon. Fingers crossed on the stove for now.
So the fridge is Frigidaire? When I was looking up reliability ratings it said to stay away from them.
Newer Frigidaire’s are apparently very problematic.
We have a 14 year old model that has been problem free.
Yes, all our appliances were. Would stay away for sure. We won’t be buying anymore of them.
I have had good luck with Whirlpool and bad luck with GE. Also GE made their refrigerator filters proprietary as mentioned above which pisses me the hell off. There was an article or Medium thing which went into the engineering work needed to make that happen and it’s absurd.
Also I disagree with the peeps here saying water at your fridge will cause a flood and that bottom freezers are bad. Both are fine. My bottom freezer fridge has water and ice in the door and the ice compartment is in the fridge part and works great. As above it was mentioned that having the fridge up higher is nice because that’s what you need more often, and it’s more energy efficient.
My only issue with it is the thin meat drawer doesn’t pull out far enough. Make sure your drawers come out far enough. :)
We got a new GE fridge about six months ago and it’s been great. Between the wirecutter and consumer reports, GE seemed to be recommended as the most reliable. We specifically wanted (1) a smaller fridge than the one that broke, (2) no icemaker / water dispenser / whatever, and certainly (3) nothing that would connect to the internet (which didn’t seem to be a problem). So we got a bog-standard GTS18GSNRSS. My research seemed to indicate that the old-fashioned top-freezer configuration was the most efficient so we were happy to go with that. I’ve found the top-freezer setup to work better than our old side-by-side (just more convenient to get in and out of, and the dimensions make it easier to use, in general), and certainly it seems better than my parents’ bottom-freezer–I always found the bottom freezer discouragingly difficult to use (seems like it shouldn’t be a hard thing to design).
We also have a chest freezer that we use for long-term storage (try to only go into it once a week), but we use the fridge freezer for our day-to-day.
So my recommendation is to keep it simple and just get a no-frills top-freezer GE, but maybe you want fancy stuff for whatever reason. ;-)
Mine is, yes. Mind it’s not new. We got it 10 years ago. Sounds like more recent ones may have more issues.