Frigidaire? Never Again!!!!

Ugh!

When we moved to our new home my wife made comments about all of the old, left behind appliances the previous owners did not take. Some of them were not so bad, so we kept them until we could find new ones that we really liked. We made due with a GE refrigerator for a while, but it needed to be upgraded fast (according to my wife).

We decided to go to Lowes to buy our appliances. I had bought a new Bosch washing machine and dryer from them previously and we had good luck with both of them. My wife wanted to look at the refrigerators since she was "more particular" than I (wanna bet...). Anyway, this big heavyset fellow named Dave from the Phillipsburgh, NJ store was courting her around the refrigerators while I picked up some other supplies. She mentioned she would pick something out and I would look it over.

When I returned, she was beaming and the fridge she picked out was this Frigidaire unit. I was a bit disappointed. I tried to explain to her that this was a low end product and I wanted to get her something really nice. But I saw her heart was set on it and the salesman was a dink-head.

We ended up getting the refrigerator. This was back in September. The delivery man came the next day and setup the refrigerator in our kitchen. When I got home I saw that they did a nice job setting it up and my wife spent the day loading it up with groceries.

Immediately I noticed how noisy it was! "Rrrrrrrrr" It moaned endlessly. Also, the ice maker jammed up and would not make ice at first (later I found out it was just a misalignment of one of the parts and we did not have that problem again). My wife saw I was upset and tried to cosole me. We had a number of minor problems with the refrigerator, but I managed to overcome each of them.

When I returned to Lowes, I spoke to the Appliance Department manager. I told him that the refrigerator I bought was garbage. He agreed to replace it with one that I liked, but he never followed through.

We ended up sticking with the refrigerator, and over several months, I learned to live with it. Afterall, my wife didn't seem to mind and she was content.

Although the refrigerator has 26 cu. feet of space, it does not seem to hold much food. It is rather deep, but due to the design, the refrigerator part is not very wide. It does have lots of shelf space - and that is a plus. It also has lots of handy shelf space on the doors. You can store a one gallon bottle of milk or water on the door shelf, amongst other things.

Nevertheless, there is nothing really outstanding about this refrigerator. Lots of plastic parts are included in the makeup. This seems to be pretty much standard among most of the other models from competitors - not just Frigidaire.

The freezer is also deep, yet not very wide. It is rather difficult to store lots of food in it. Although the unit as a whole received a rather good Energy Star rating, I could see the flaw of having a side-by-side freezer. Large volumes of cold air escape every time you open the door. Also, the ice making machine and storage bin take up a lot of freezer space, although it works pretty darn good at making ice.

The unit has a through the door ice and water service spot. You simply hold a glass up against a lever in the freezer door, and ice fills your cup. You can select either whole or crushed ice. Although it works well at delivering ice, it actually gives out a lot more ice than I want most of the times. You need to get used to it. The water service works the same way - hold your glass up against a lever and the water pours into your cup...but...very...very...s..l..o..w..l..y. So slow in fact that I usually ignor it and get water from the sink. Ugh!

The water that comes into the unit has a pretty neat filter system. There are replacebale cartriges that take out junk from the water. Guess what? The replacement cartridges are pretty expensive too! To me, the water tastes the same as our tap water so I do not know what the big fuss is all about.

One big plus is the finish is very children friendly. My wife told me she choose the refrigertor because she liked the finish - it has lots of ridges and it is not totally smooth like some of the other refrigerators. So, it hides lots of little fingerprints.

Well, ten months have gone by since we got our noisy refrigerators and things have been pretty boring as far as it is concerned. That all changed yesterday morning when my wife woke me up to tell me the refrigerator was no longer cold. I went down, checked the electric plug - we had power since the door lights worked. The digital display that tells you the temperature was not working.

I called Lowes and they deflected me to the repair service. The repairman came out and told me a circuit board had burned out. "Oh my gosh! Not even a year old and the board fried!" He had to order a replacement, so all of our food in the refrigerator will now go spoiled.

The repairman also told me that whoever assembled the refrigerator had put the wrong circuit board in. The circuit board in our refrigerator belonged in a lesser model. Geez!

This refrigerator has mostly all of the standard features (ho-hum) crisper drawer, meat drawer, egg rack, in-door butter holder. Nothing here is very inventive. In the freezer, there is a wire bin that you can remove. The ice bucket is a big difficult to take out, in case you want to use the contents to fill a cooler. The lighting is adequate in both the refrigerator section and the freezer section.

Needless to say, I would not recommend this refrigerator to anyone. I am dead set against ever buying this brand again (we also had a poor experience with a Frigidaire dishwasher I replaced). Quality is just not there.

On the other hand, I do not know of ANY refrigerators I would buy in place of this one. As mentioned earlier, many of the features in this refrigerator were common in others sold at Lowes. Others suggested Whirlpool makes a good refrigerator, so I might take a look at them - at a place other than Lowes too. Thanks for reading my review and best wishes for a nice day!

Mike