During our never ending kitchen remodel, my husband lucked out and scored a new job. Along with quitting his old job, he received all of his vacation time paid out to him. Since he's one of those IT/Tech guys that always works and never plays, it equaled a nice big fat check. Along with now being able to afford to hire someone to lay our tile floor (yes!), we were also able to afford new appliances. Sweet!
Our current refrigerator came along with the house, and it was an eyesore. The gasket that sealed the doors was worn, and it was old enough to have a wooden handle (where most fridges now have plastic handles). I actually didn't realize how bad it looked until we began to look for new fridges.
Fridge shopping was a completely overwhelming task. We had several requirements:
1.)
The fridge must be white. At first I wanted to go with a stainless steel fridge, until I started looking at some of the floor models. Fingerprints galore! I have four (small) dogs and I didn't even want to think about the nose-prints. Not to mention that our kitchen is teeny tiny, and so we wanted to do everything to make sure our appliances blended in with our new white cabinets and make the room appear bigger.
2.)
The fridge must have a smooth door front (not textured). Our new kitchen cabinets were the sleekest, most glossiest ones you could find at Ikea. A textured front just would look
wrong. Unfortunately, smooth door fronts are tough to find!
3.)
The fridge must fit into a 36" space. That's the space we were working with. I wanted a fridge to fill the space nicely.
So those were our basic requirements. This narrowed down our field considerably, and it came down between a French door style refrigerator w/bottom freezer from LG, and the Whirlpool Gold Top Freezer Refrigerator. They were almost the only two brands that offered smooth-front doors. We ended up choosing the Whirlpool even though the LG was much fancier. At first I thought I'd have some regrets, but I surprisingly haven't (maybe because the money I saved allowed me to buy a better oven!).
We purchased our
Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator at Best Buy because they were currently offering some sort of financing deal with their credit card (I think it was 0% APR financing for a certain amount of months) but we ended up paying it off right away anyway. Best Buy also had a $100 rebate on any two Whirlpool appliances (which came in handy for our new stove). The original price of the fridge was $799.99. We had to special order it, and it took approximately 5 weeks to arrive (which Best Buy said was normal even if you were to purchase it from some place like Sears).
The Fridge:
Handles:
One of the first things I liked about the
Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator was that it was very sleek looking. It has no front-mounted handle; instead, it has what Whirlpool calls "contoured doors" with the handles built into the top and bottom of the doors. The plus-side to this is that it gives a very sleek appearance. The down-side is that the doors are built so they can be mounted either to the right or left and there are handles on both sides, meaning that it could be confusing to someone who doesn't know which way the refrigerator opens! My dad, when visiting, always yanks on the right side of the door first just to be funny. Har, har.
Panels/Look:
The front panels of the refrigerator are very smooth and glossy. There is a sort of dull plastic toward the top of the refrigerator door and bottom of the freezer door, and this is where the handles are. It does detract a little from the sleek look but not much, and it helps keeps fingerprinting to a minimum.
The sides of the refrigerator are textured, which we were trying to get away from, but thankfully the refrigerator doesn't stick out too much from the cabinets.
Measurements:
The
Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator measures approximately 32-1/2" wide by 65-1/2" tall. It fits perfectly under my 36" wide refrigerator cabinet. Had we gone any wider (I believe the LG is 35.5" wide), it wouldn't have fit. The Whirlpool fridge is 32-1/2" deep and sticks out about six inches from my cabinets.
Features:
The Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator has several nice features, such as:
*Dual upfront temperature control knobs record your preferred settings; Accu-Chill temperature management system maintains settings for accurate results
*4 adjustable, slide-out SpillGuard shelves
*3 door shelves with gallon door storage to accommodate oversized items
*EZ-Vue humidity-controlled crispers, EZ-Vue meat pan and egg bin
*Freezer shelf
*Freezer light
*Factory-installed icemaker (water connection needed)
Offering 21.7 cu ft of space, this fridge is almost too big for just my husband and I, considering we tend to eat out a lot. The shelves are adjustable. We are easily able to fit in a few gallons or milk or water (or orange juice) on the main shelf. The other shelves, which we've arranged with less height between them, offer enough depth to store our take-out containers and other items that need refrigeration. The door contains three shelves that offer even more storage space. One of the shelves is wide enough to store yet another gallon container (so it's feasible to store your milk in the door). There is another built-in shelf below the three adjustable door shelves, toward the bottom of the fridge, and this is where we usually keep our condiments. There's enough space in the fridge that even after I buy groceries (admittedly only once a month), it still looks empty.
The shelves are what
Whirlpool calls "SpillGuard shelves". They are smooth glass and are extremely easy to wipe clean.
The bottom bins are large and spacious and feature "humidity control", which I haven't quite figured out yet. On the current settings (low humidity), a bag of opened lettuce mix lasts about five to six days, which seems to be about the same as my old refrigerator. I'll have to play more with these settings.
I love that the freezer has an ice maker (waterline needed). We've had no problems thus far with the ice maker and it has done an excellent job of keeping the ice bin full. The freezer-light is also another great feature that allows you to see the contents of your freezer clearly. We do not store a lot of things in our freezer since we also have a deep freeze, but what little we have stored has not suffered any sort of freezer burn. Everything that we've heated up from the freezer tastes great. The freezer also has one wire shelf in the middle and two built-in shelves in the door.
This refrigerator does not have any water dispenser or water filtration, which is fine for our needs.
The
Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator is also Energy Star Compliant.
Other styles:
For $300 more, you can have the same style refrigerator with a water dispenser built into the front and a slide-out freezer drawer. This model was not on display at Best Buy but was listed online. We felt like we didn't need those additional options.
Cons:
There are only a few issues with the refrigerator that I've run into. One is that sometimes when we shut the freezer door, the refrigerator makes a noise kind of like a high-pitched whirring for a few seconds (maybe 8 seconds). It's definitely odd and while not loud, it's noticable. I'm not sure what could be causing this. It only occurs when we shut the freezer, and maybe only half the time.
Besides the odd noise, the refrigerator is very quiet and I usually do not hear it running (unless the ice cube maker is going).
Another issue is that the refrigerator tends to roll forward on our tile floor when I pull the door if we do not have enough food in it to weigh it down. Which...I suppose is more of our problem than Whirlpool's, LOL.
The Bottom-line:
Given our requirements, we frankly didn't have much to choose from. We either had a choice between the
Whirlpool 21.7 Cu. Ft. Frost-Free Top-Mount Refrigerator or an LG refrigerator (which seemed to be the only other line that made smooth front doors). I'm glad that we went with the Whirlpool. It looks great with our sleek and glossy cabinets, and offers more than enough space for our food. It's been easy to clean. I have only owned the refrigerator for two months, and will update this review if any future problems arise. :)
Other Products Purchased (and reviewed) during my kitchen remodel:
Bosch SHX33A02 Dishwasher
Jenn-Air 400 Watts Attrezzi JSM900 Stand Mixer
