New Fridge

Yesterday I went to Sears to check out the refrigerators I had been researching all week. I had narrowed my choices down substantially by picking 1. Energy Star 2. Top Freezer 3. Icemaker 4. 18 cubic feet and 5. White. Sears narrowed my choices down substantially further by offering something that fit all of those criteria and selling it for only $500 with free delivery. Nobody else could come close. Lowes had a Whirlpool, which I would have rather gotten, but it was a hundred dollars more and they would have charged for delivery.

I looked at a few higher-end refrigerators to see what I was missing. Better refrigerators have shelves that are much easier to slide and allow smaller adjustments on shelf height. For all intents and purposes, the shelves on my fridge don’t slide, but if you pull hard enough they will move. So I decided I would take it. The salesman got everything ready, but when he checked his computer, the model I wanted, the 77882, was not available for Sunday delivery. So he changed it to the “identical” 77872. When I got home I checked the two models. The 82 is 10 higher than the 72, so you have to figure it is 10 better. But right now the 72 is $70 more so he manually overrode that price and sold it to me at the same $500. The only differences in features were the 82 has “ice storage” and a beverage rack. I think the ice storage is bogus. It’s not like the icemaker just dumps ice into the freezer. The big difference were the reviews on Sears’ website. The 72 had 8 reviews with an average of 3.9 stars out of 5. Most people complained about the noise despite Sears saying there was a special noise-reducing compressor. The 82 had 8 reviews as well, but its average score was 4.7 stars (a couple of people complained about noise). I called up to ask for them to change the order. I got the same salesman who said the two fridges were exactly the same except for the beverage rack and he would put one of those in the mail to me. He said they have the different models so they can put one on sale and the other at regular price (which is what they did). So I stuck with the order.

I spent all day cleaning up the old brown refrigerator in case it would eventually be used by someone again and cleaning up the kitchen so the delivery people wouldn’t think they were putting the new fridge in a bad home. They were to arrive between 4 and 6 PM and call one hour ahead of time. They never did call, but at 5:58 PM they were here. And they were gone in no time too.

There is no question, it is noisy. It makes about as much noise as fan. I could hear it when I walked in the front door. But it’s still pretty nice. There is a shelf in the freezer to hold things. And the bins on the door are pretty neat: They are about half the width of the door and can be put just about anywhere. Other than that, it is pretty much just a refrigerator.

The icemaker makes the little crescents that most icemakers make. My old fridge made round pellets, about the size of a stack of 10 quarters. The crescents are bad because that circumference matches up perfectly with most glasses and invariably blocks the flow when you want to take a sip. Maybe I’ll get square glasses.

As I finished writing this at 8:00, I heard the first batch of ice hit the storage bin. It is the dirtiest ice ever. The ice is yellow and you can see dirt in the cubes. They said don’t use the first 24-hours worth of ice.