My old side-by-side was about 15 years old and was the smallest model available at the time I bought it. Since then, I've married to a man who loves to cook and entertain as much as I do, and the freezer section was woefully inadequate. In addition to being small, it was so narrow that I had to put in lasagne pans on a tilt.
One fine day, in a buyin' mood, we trucked off to Sears to buy a freestanding freezer to keep in the garage to replace the elderly manual-defrost that we didn't use because I refuse to defrost freezers.
(Let me digress for a moment and tell you that in my old house, the original fridge had a manual-defrost top freezer which stood in the tiny utility room, right opposite the back door. At defrost time, I would haul out my hottest hair dryer, a spatula, and an iron, and tackle the icebergs with first the hair dryer and spatula, and finally the iron and spatula. The chunks of ice would go flying over my shoulder out the door onto the driveway, to the shock and consternation of the neighbors and passers-by, who couldn't figure out where the hail was coming from. But as a World-Class Speed Freezer Defroster, I could get 8'' of ice out of that puppy in about 15 minutes. So you can see that I'm an authority on the subject!)
Anyway, we found the freezer we wanted, and wouldn't you know it - Sears couldn't guarantee delivery within three months. So we started roaming the aisles, drooling over the side-by-sides and gradually talking ourselves into buying one.
OK, here comes the confession: According to the Sears man, the model to which this page is dedicated is last year's. The one we bought is this year's version. It is functionally identical in all its features. The only difference is the doors, about which more later. Features
The capacity of this monster is more than ample for even a big family.
The fridge side has three drawers for veggies and meat. We don't keep much meat in the fridge, so we use two for produce and one for cheeses. Each has a separate humidity control.
Three of the shelves are actually the tops of the drawer compartments, and all shelves are made of tempered glass with white plastic edges, so stuff that spills won't drip down to the shelves below.
The top shelf in the fridge only extends halfway toward the door from the back wall.
The second-from-the-top shelf has a latch that allows you to push the front half back under the back half, so you can store tall bottles on the shelf below it.
The door has storage shelves with relatively high sides and fronts, and they vary in depth. You can store half-gallons of juices in the middle one, and it easily holds eight quart containers.
A suspended wine-bottle cradle come with it. It fastens to the underside of the top shelf and holds a bottle of wine, which keeps it out of the way.
All the door shelves and bins are removable and adjustable, so you can take them out for cleaning and place them where you need them.
The ice-maker is in the freezer door, rather than inside the freezer.
The ice and water delivery system gives you a choice of crushed or whole ice as well as ice-water. It also has a light so you can find it in the middle of the night.
The water delivery system that feeds the ice-maker and dispensers features a filter cartridge, so you get filtered water through the door.
The outside surface of the unit is smooth rather than pebbly, the doors are slightly bowed out, and the top of the doors is slightly arched.
What we like about this fridge
We LOVE having all that room. I try to shop carefully from a list, but I'm a sucker for farmer's markets and whole food stores and gourmet shops, so my fridge is always crammed full of items that are gradually evolving into alternate life forms before we get around to eating them. But I can't come close to filling this monster, so we can still see everything and aren't wasting so much.
I love the flip-up shelves, too. Other models had similar features, but they were more awkward to use and took up more space; one even had shelves that fold up against the side wall of the interior, which takes up a lot of space. These slide back and take up almost no room.
I like being able to set the humidity of each produce drawer. In the bad old days, when I opened the fridge and something inside called me ''Mommy!'' I knew it was time to clean out the produce drawers. But with the humidity adjustment, everything stays in it's original form much longer and we don't have to worry about alternate life forms any more.
Ice-makers take up space wherever they are, but I really like having the entire interior of the freezer available for storage. The fiddly little things (all my red spices, small fruit ice cups, sticks of butter, and so on) that usually fit into the freezer door still fit, so I don't feel that I've lost much space.
I like the idea of filtered water through the fridge. We have terrible water, and haven't yet put in a purification system, so rely heavily on the Brita pitcher (Shameless plug coming up: See my Brita review. Shameless plug complete.) The water that comes out of the dispenser is cold, so it takes longer to cook with it, but the important thing is that it's filtered. The salesman told us that the filter is good for about two years of average use, whatever that is, but we use less because we're gone all day so it will probably last longer.
I also like the fact that the filtration system has a warning light that tells you when it's time to change the filter.
After many years with a supposedly fingerprint-free pebbly surface on my old fridge, which never got quite clean unless I tackled it with a toothbrush (fat chance,) I love having a smooth surface again.
This is an Energy-Star product, so it uses considerably less energy than similar-sized and featured fridges that don't have that designation.
What I would change
The instruction book advises you to pitch out the first two or three gallons of dispensed water after installing a new filter. I did that - in fact, I drew off about six gallons of water before I drank my first glass. They were gritty and oogy, as I expected them to be. But two weeks later, I was still getting some gunk in my water glass. So I think the instructions should be amended to warn the users that they probably have to toss the first ten gallons, not two or three. Ditto for the ice - I pitched the first four bins-full.
? The bottom bin in the fridge door is supposedly for eggs, but there's no egg-keeper in it. So we still have to keep the eggs in the carton, which is supposed to be better for them anyway. But then what differentiates this bin from any other? My darling husband insists on taking the eggs out of the carton and putting them loose in the bin, where they roll around like pinballs; he insists that this is the egg-keeper so it's OK. I'm waiting for them all to clang together and break next time he lets the door slam.
I know the bowed doors and arched top are supposed to be classy design features, but to me, they look silly; they have nothing to do with the function of the unit. A fridge is a fridge, not a piece of furniture, so I'd just as soon have flat doors and top. But I can easily live with it as is.
Overall, I'm very pleased with this fridge; I love having all that space, it's easy to keep clean, the interior fittings are adjustable to suit your needs, and I love the endless supply of ice. It's party time!
