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| Anyone who has bought a new refrigerator in the past few years has made the same horrible discovery that I recently made - American refrigerators have gotten huge in the past few years. The great big 18 cubic foot one I got as a wedding present in 1980 is now considered a small, quaint anachronism. 15 and 17 cubic-foot sizes have disappeared completely. (Anything smaller than 18 cubic feet is considered an "apartment-size" fridge and treated with disdain by appliance dealers. These are typically 10-12 cubic feet and there are usually a couple in the very back of the showroom that you will be shown only if you specifically ask.) |
| If, however, you naively ask for a refrigerator that fits your kitchen, i.e., about the size of the one you have now, salesmen will sigh heavily and inform you that you don't have a lot of choices. Specifically, even the smallest full-size refrigerator (18 cubic feet) is typically 3 inches deeper than a similar model from the 1980s. That means that unless you live in a very new house, which was built with a huge inset refrigerator niche for the 25 cubic-foot behemoths that are apparently considered standard these days, your new refrigerator will stick out several inches past your counters. The only other choice offered by most American manufacturers is something called "cabinet-depth" models, most of which are more than 35" wide. They also tend to be pricey, since the market they are aimed at is people who actually wanted a "built-in" (VERY expensive), but couldn't quite afford it. |
| The supposed reason for all of this is that modern refrigerators have more insulation than older ones because of federal energy-efficiency standards. In order to avoid the dreaded smaller capacity, of course manufacturers had no choice but to make all their fridges deeper. It is never explained why they couldn't have made some of them wider or taller instead, just in case there are a few people out there who don't want to knock a hole in their wall to accommodate a new fridge. And appliance dealers just look baffled if you ask them why you can't buy a refrigerator with, say, 17 cubic feet instead of 18-25. |
| Anyway, having no need for a gigantic refrigerator and no desire to knock a hole in my wall, I have spent the last few weeks searching for refrigerators that will give me the features I want in the space I actually have in my kitchen. I was specifically looking for a side-by-side or bottom-freezer model, which limited my choices quite a bit (top freezers are the least sensible, but most common, design). Anyway, here's what I found. |
| Metric/imperial conversion site that handles litres->cubic feet: http://www.pitt.edu/~rsup/volumeconv.html |
| Model | Type | kwh
/yr |
Cu' | H | W | D | Comments | Pro | Con | |
 |
GE GSS20IBMCC | side/side | 624 | 20 | 67" | 32" | 27.5" | water & ice through the door | best water/ice | energy use, largest size |
|
GE Profile
PDS18LBMCC |
bottom
freezer |
548 | 18 | 66" | 31" | 29" | icemaker, filtered water inside door | best fresh food compartment | small freezer, awkward freezer design |
|
Samsung
CoolTech Plus |
bottom
freezer |
na | 18 | 69" | 32" | 28" | Korean, only at BestBuy. Exact model not found online. | Best freezer design. Separate evaporator for freezer section. | no ice-maker or water. door shelves not adjustable, cheap looking |
|
Conserv Equator | bottom
freezer |
321 | 10.5 | 79 | 24 | 23 | Danish, not available locally | shallow, super energy efficient | not available locally. And it's really too small. |
| And the winner is - the GE Profile Bottom Mount. It's
not precisely what we wanted, but it is almost exactly the same
size as our old top-mount, which wasn't true of any other bottom-mount
unit that we could find. What we really would have liked was the top half
of the GE with the Samsung freezer. But that wasn't an option, so we dithered
back and forth and finally decided that you spend more time in the fresh
food compartment than the freezer and went with the nicer fresh food section.
I also really liked the built-in water filter jug in the door - almost
as good as the a thru-the-door water dispenser and less likely to malfunction.
We love being able to see all the way to the back of all the shelves without
having to bend over or stoop, and the big adjustable door shelves are a
great improvement over our old fridge.
The pullout freezer is on the small side and the double basket arrangement is just as awkward as it looked like it would be. But we have a big freezer in the basement, so it doesn't matter all that much. An icemaker came with this model, but we haven't gotten around to having it installed yet. |
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Site Last Updated Sept
21, 2002
By Sharon
Kahn