Frigidaire's Professional Counter Depth Stainless Steel Refrigerator Fits My Marriage and Kitchen
Written: Mar 21 '06 (Updated Mar 26 '06)
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Pros: Stylish, freezes and cools efficiently and powerfully, adjustable bins and shelves, nice controls
Cons: Icemaker jams, bottom bin needs door nearly completely open not to scrape door seal
The Bottom Line: If you have to maintain a counter depth for kitchen beauty and marital coexistence, this is the fridge that has as much size, features, and function for the pricey price.
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| bntowen's Full Review: Frigidaire Professional Counter Depth Stainless St... |
Seventeen years of marriage, and conflict is wonderfully rare. But conflict over money, romance, and selfish endeavors would be would-be sources of intramartial discord. But one would never have predicted that appliances would drive a wedge between us. In fact, a refrigerator came between us…literally. Short back-story readers. We spent the last years of our fleeting existence building a house. No, not with tools and materials, but with a contractor and fifteen thousand details instead of the fifteen million had I been daffy enough to embark on house building myself.
One of those essential details was appliance shopping. I am shopper. Not the adjective, the noun. Research froze a path to a Frigidaire. The exact model was encamped in a bargain area with an imperceptible dent from forklift imprecision at Lowes. 33 cubit feet of cabin space to cool my culinary dreams. The price for this side-by-side stainless ice and filtered water deluxe appliance was, nearly half retail price at $545. My appliance allowance was five hundred in the black with delivery and icemaker installation paid for. Upon arrival, I prepared a subtle welcome with some Mylar balloons and a fridge-shaped cake with one candle in it. The installation technicians gingerly slid the silver case into a specially crafted cabinet. However, the cabinet was only slightly the deeper than the depth of the counters㐏inches. This Frigidaire’s Counter-depth measurements dimensions are 27” deep x 36” wide x 68.5” tall with nearly 23 cubit feet of cooling space. The fridge stuck out eight inches and swallowed up the corner cabinets. While my wife looked unhappy, I moved into my manly fix-this-with-logic mode. No dice. She wanted a counter-depth unit. I fought. I lost. I fought some more. I lost more. I surrendered, returned to Lowes and proceeded to be a shining test of customer service, service.
Patrolling the counter-depth models after the major bargain was like selling the Civic to buy the Lexus. Parlaying all the deals, I settled on the exact Frigidaire model only 26-inch depth. At close to $1700, my appliance budget went from black to red, but when they slide this into the counter space, it looked like it was meant to be. So I was wro…wro…my wife had an extremely good point.
Features:
Freezer space is more than ample for such a model with two shelves three basket-framed shelves that rotate forward to kick out the taller or bagged frozens. The doors have three bins and a shelf. Above the shelf is the ice bin and maker. The icemaker has a shelf in front for ice cream and other items. Eventually, everyone will meet their maker, but the Frigidaire’s icemaker is both good and bad. The bad is the ice making process could freeze a whole line of ice to the point where it jams the Ice-Kicker-Outer a.k.a. the IKO. To fix, one must pull off the plastic protective shield and shelf removing everything lazy buyer like me put on the shelf. I must then delicately smash the bar of ice freezing up the IKO, and wait for a few hours for more ice since I ran it out thinking I had a full bin. But sadly, many times, I was a man unaware that he was functioning without a full bin. The good news about the ice is the chute. Until you’ve owned a GE whose chute freezes a glacial size mass of ice when it jams and avalanches said glacial mass onto your foot and kitchen floor, you won’t appreciate the Frigidaire’s icemaker chute. When you’re done filling your glass, there are gathering residual cubes in the chute. Added to this are through-the-door icemaker options such as crushed, and an extra ice button that imperceptibly makes more ice…faster. It’s not ice-chute amazing, but does fill your bin. Oh boy.
Now lets talk about cold. How low can it go? The digital thermostat for dummies is easy to use and read at the interior top of the door frame. It goes to עF ( 6F is warmest setting). It’s mafia-limb cold. Other through-the-door functions include filtered water with filter replacement indicator (takes a PureSource2 RF-100 cartridge, 400gal. capacity at .5gpms, approx. 6-9 months of use) as well as an extreme cold function to take it from 0 to עF in no time flat. Lastly, there’s a “Lock” button to keep toddler-aged computer programmers from performing liquid and solid water dispensing experiments on the kitchen floor while pushing various through-the-door features. Finally, I like the separate water and ice “bays” that were more convenient that the comparable Maytag requiring me to switch from ice to water button functions.
Now for the main compartment, the refrigerator or what they term the “Fresh Food” compartment part of the Frigidaire Counter Depth refrigerator. Temperature controls can take the refrigerator from a high of 47F to a low of 33F. The temperature control panel also a warning station. Flashing green light means door has been open for five minutes or more that in my house translates to an “Electricity Doesn’t Grow On Trees Lecture” for ten times the time the door was left open. Flashing amber is an hour of the freezer 45F or higher or a similar power outage.
Inside shelving is spill-proof, adjustable, and in two cases sliding. One adjustable shelf has a crank to quickly raise and lower the shelf to accommodate variable juice, milk, or other containers so as to slide easily under adjacent shelf. A wine rack was included that doubles as a cylindrical "Whatever-I-Want-to-Put-in-There Shelf". Then there are two bins that are the biggest lie in the industry until now. They are the “Meat Keeper” and “Vegetable Crisper” that for the GE should have been accurately named the “Meat Warmer” and “Vegetable Rotter”. However, this Frigidaire actually keeps meat and vegetables longer than the stays that accidentally appear and remain in the shelves “unbinned”. There are the obligatory sliding humidity adjusters for the crisper, but I’m not declaring my undying belief in their validity. In the opposing door there are not only five adjustable bins, but also five easily adjustable bins. A dairy compartment with its cute Plexiglas face shield is included in case an angry guest tries to punch out a stick of your butter. There’s even a tall bottle retainer bar to retain tall bottles easily toppled by Herculean pulls on the massive door handles. Oh, and about the door handles. They’re substantial and can fit a man’s hand around them without cramming the knuckles into the fridge door. The door seals make an airtight sounding slap-woosh, and are cushy. Not technical appliance jargon but it helps in not getting the “You’re-a- Hack-For-The-Appliance-Company” feedback.
Drawbacks:
To that end, lets talk about drawbacks. The lower and largest of the Fresh Food bins pulls out so close to the right hand door seals that the door has to be approximately 150 degrees open to avoid shearing off the right hand side door seals. The toe plate on the bottom can be toed out of place and is difficult to snap back into place for the spatially challenged. The icemaker as I noted can freeze up pardon the pun, and I’m sure we didn’t use 400 gallons of water before the filter light came on. Also, the icemaker drawer if opened or not properly aligned will shower the freezer compartment in cube that will eventually end up on the kitchen floor when items are removed. The ice on the floor is best given up to the ice gods.
However, the unit is quiet, energy efficient, roomy for it’s reduced counter-depth nearly 23 cubic foot size and has shelving and bins that are so, so adjustable and usable. The expense? Only it you must have a counter depth model. But if you must? You must have this Frigidaire.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1649.00
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Epinions.com ID:
bntowen
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Member: Bradford Owen
Location: North Carolina Mountains, USA
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
Father of five, full-time shrink, part-time writer, actor, referee, living on a massive 3/4acre estate.
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