Refrigerator Advise
 

Our LG french door refrigerator is only 7 years old and needs a new compressor that will cost $1,100 to fix. Needless to say, we will be shopping for a new one. The repairman told us to look at a side by side because they don't break as often.

Would appreciate any advise and experience with a particular brand. Thank you.

I have good luck with GE.

We’ve had good luck with GE. Not so much with Frigidaire.

I think lg has a 10 yr compressor (parts only) warrenty. Might want to check on that

IMO Paying more don’t mean the will last longer. IMO lucky to get 7 years. Why? Most set there and run till the break from overheating. I suspect most will not pull them out and clean condenser cooling coils and fan or defrost them every year or so. Sooner it you have pets. Even then no guarantee it will last longer due to electronic part failure in system.
You can go to see who makes what brand

Appliance411 The Purchase: Who Makes What?

I brought expense Maytag few years ago and put my old side by side hot point in garage. Right after the warranty ran out the compressor died with similar costs to repair. I got rid of it and put old hot point back in kitchen.

How long is the warranty on a LG refrigerator compressor?
5 years
LG Refrigerator Cooling (Sealed) System warranty now covers 5 years, parts & labor, from the date of purchase on its components (Compressor*, Condenser, Evaporator, Drier, and Connecting Tube).Mar

From Google LG in USA.

I use my cordless leaf blower and clean under the fridge . It removes all the dirt/ dust off the evaporator and keeps everything running like a champ! Do it when your significant other is shopping! Sometimes they don't understand

That advice doesn't make sense to me-not sure why configuration would matter. What I do know is I HATE side by side refrigerators-not enough room in either refrigerator or freezer areas, and I just don't use the bottom refrigerator drawer as its just too darn low. Freezer on the bottom for sure! Like GE; I've been warned about terrible service for Samsung in these parts but had good luck with a Samsung back home.

I do too sometimes after I vacuum but I position wet towels to catch the dust.

In some arrangement side by side better cause you can’t get single door open all the way. Side by side are more efficient cause you are not opening up the whole inside of refrigerator. That why the make difference model configuration to please everybody.

Buy a new one everything is junk
Remember when you were a kid parents threw old one away because they were tired of seeing the rust You couldn't kill em

we quickly gave away every kitchen appliance that came with our new designer house and replaced everything with the Sears Kenmore Elite model...we had that brand when we lived in Ft Lauderdale and in our home up north

never had an issue with it

wife never felt that the side-by-side was a style she wanted....she does like the freezer on the bottom

My friend had a 7 year old LG that the compressor failed 3 days before closing on her house. LG would have sent a new part, covered by the 10 year warranty, but time was against her. So she replaced the part at her own expense, $270, NOT $1100----get another repair estimate

Single door bottom freezer, whirlpool, made in ohio, rated good
Seals on double doors leaked for me,
Tossed Samsung that came with the house recently.

We had our compressor replaced by LG. They have repair people who work for them in FL. Their office is in Alabama and they dispatch LG employees from there. 1-800-243-0000 It is not a $1100 repair.

I'm sure you will get many conflicting posts. We insist on buying refrigerators far more complex than they used to be. Would anyone buy a refrigerator that does not self defrost.
Ice and cooled water in the door? We have that, frankly it is great. It is also the item in your refrigerator most likely to need repair. There is also a matter of parts availability.
What you will get here, including mine, is opinion.
We have Westinghouse and it came with our prebuilt new Villages home. It is now 9 years old. There was an issue with a redesigned hose causing water leaks on the defrost cycle. Westinghouse repaired it at n/c after the warranty was up. Our ice maker failed. We were told by the repair guy that the NEW redesigned replacement part was the same as the original one that the redesigned on put in our refrigerator originally replaced. The old one worked, the new one that came with our refrigerator regularly fails.
Our previous home came with a CROWN STOVE. At 30 years old it was still working fine. Wife insisted we get rid of that old thing. Must have self cleaning oh and be pretty.
The guy who picked up our old stove laughed and said you do not want to do this.
We bought three new stoves to get through the next 10 years.
Aside my sister has a GE refrigerator old type with the motor on top. Date code on the motor says 1936. It is still running in her basement. A conversation piece? No it does not self defrost-it never did. Efficiency who knows?

If it is like my LG dryer the warranty is useless. My dryer drum cracked at the weld. A drum cost $180 and I can get it out in 20 minutes. Call LG and there is a lifetime warranty on the drum but you need a tech to come out for $180 to look at it and see it is cracked and then pay them $250 to put the drum in to get the free replacement!

GE, Whirlpool, Kitchenaid bottom freezer. Avoid Samsung and LG.

My Kenmore Elite side by side (made by Whirlpool) is about 20 years old now but it hasn't been problem free. At about five years it stopped cooling. I looked at it and the start relay failed, about $20 for a new one and it was good to go. Then a few years later it was cooling but the divider between the freezer and fridge was so hot you couldn't touch it (over 100 degrees). The cooling fan failed. Whirlpool went to an electronic Panasonic fan ($110) from the old metal $17 fan that last forever. Replaced it with the old style fan and they still had a second set of mounting hole in the fridge for the old style fan! Then the ice maker failed. Took it apart and a copper trace on the circuit board was vaporized! I soldered a jumper copper wire in and it worked fine for the last 10 years. I had the water at the door stop working, it turned out to be the line iced up. I defrosted it twice and not sure why but it has never iced up again. It has a removable ice bin in the door, the plastic catches are worn so you can't get ice out the door anymore but it wasn't worth it to pay the price they wanted for a new bin(way over $100) so I just open the door for ice. The door handle is plastic and it broke where it attaches to the bottom of the door. I used aluminum and epoxy and that it worked until the top also broke a few years later so I fixed that. The plastic handle is now discolored due to age but it works. I also had an issue with the nozzle to the water in the door, the plastic is brittle and it snapped about an inch off. Now you need to be a little more careful to make sure the glass is all the way under before you fill the glass. Other than that it has been fine!

We generally go with Whirlpool but when we bought a larger fridge we got a Samsung side by side. Works fine and holds plenty. We felt that the Samsung had the least space taken by the ice maker. Under $1500.

Just avoid any Samsung appliances
 

Samsung is pure trash!

If you look at Consumer Reports you will see that LG is the top rated unit in all categories and three of the French Door units were rated excellent.

5 - 10 years is the average life span of todays appliances. If you want a longer lifespan, you need to get a commercial grade or a brand that is residential and built to commercial grade standards. Me, I prefer a brand that last 1/2 the life span of a commercial grade and costs 1/3 the price and refresh the look of my kitchen every few years.

I have an LG top bottom refrigerator then my old house. What a hunk of junk. First of all it's impossible to find anyone to repair them. Same thing happened to my friend and my parents...all LG. I don't see myself buying LG ever again.
I eventually found someone to repair the refrigerator. I told him I'm selling the house to live in a year. He said that's probably as long as the repair will last.
Good luck

Refrigerator advise
 

My spouse used the leaf blower once and dust coated every surface in the kitchen. We just roll out our 8 1/2 yr old French door Maytag and vacuum the coils & floor. It runs like a charm.

We are very happy with our Kenmore 1 door refrigerator.

Stay away from Samsung the ice maker doesn’t work after a year - check the internet for class action lawsuit

Internet searches shows they’re basically all garbage now. Class action lawsuits, endless complaints....

My GE was repaired 4x under warranty before they replaced it with a brand new one. That new one arrived and wouldn’t power up so they had to send another brand new one.

Just had the same problem. Might be under warranty. Call Show Time TV 352-307-0155. They are authorized by LG.I would call Lg first.

They don’t make anything to last these days. Before moving here we had a Kenmore refrigerator that we purchased in 1995 and it was still running strong. Hated to leave it at our old home. I am sure the new owners will be using it for many more years!

A few years back, I bought some top of the line Electrolux appliances for my home up north. Right from the beginning I had nothing but problems with them. Luckily, the store I bought them from stood behind them. After about a year I was so frustrated with these appliances I asked the store owner if he could give me any amount of credit towards other appliances. I really didn’t care how much, I just wanted to get rid of the appliances I had. He told me to hold onto the ones I had, he would continue to fix them at no cost and the problems would finally go away and they did. The reason he did not want to swap them out and as the store owner he hated to admit this, is that all the appliances made today are basically junk. He said you are lucky to get ten years out of them. He said if you want to place blame it is not with the manufacturer’s but with the government. In order to meet the EPA’s requirements for energy efficiency the manufacturer’s had to drastically reduce the size of the motors and other components to meet these requirements. The twenty pound motor that use to be in your parents refrigerator and lasted 25 years is now five pounds and so on and so forth. The result is these units are not built to last they are built for efficiency only and you can plan on replacing them far more often.

Our frig died last year. The service technician said to buy a new frig that did not use LG parts such as the compressor, evaporator coils, etc. He recommended we buy a Whirlpool, GE, Frigidaire or Kitchen Aid refrigerator. They do not use LG parts.

According to Consumer Reports, side by side refrigerators are the least efficient of all those out there. I've had side by side, and I couldn't agree more.

I’ve done that too! Only problem is the dust seems to float around for hours afterwards. Also “blew out” the laundry room. 😜

I bought a Maytag and it died also but I encountered a problem with the size of the space I had and the cabinets around it. I had limited choice and Maytag was the only one that would fit after my husband filed down the cabinet above it. I got smarter and paid for the one with a 10y compressor waranty. They are out there.

Far from an appliance expert but a refrigerator in a garage, is a hostile environment.
HOT in summer and COLD in winter as well as, in my garage, dusty and chemicals (garden stuff-etc)

My LG compressor went out in April. Sears quoted us $1600 to replace. So we bought a new LG. Its coming in August.

They are rating convenience and features. What you want to read is RELIABILITY data. When we shopped for all new appliances we ended up with a mix of brands. We bought the best of each type. Something to consider.

Skip

Re: warranties
People tend not to read the fine print. A common gotcha. A two year warranty with a prorated warranty for the rest of the warranty period. Typically it is based on list price.
Real price, sometimes called street price is far less than list price. So you can spin reality.
A TEN YEAR WARRANTY may mean 5 years or less.

Everything is debatable. I seem to recall reading that a top freezer is more efficient because cold air falls. More efficient? They of course need to say something.
The question for us is cost to run and convenience to use.

We for example have an ice dispenser and filtered cold water in the door. Truth they are high repair items, cost of filters etc. Our water taste is great and we do not need to open the refrigerator door spilling out the cold-reality cold is lack of heat so letting heat in is the truth.

The good and the bad. Perhaps too many choices. Sort of like a doughnut place, thirty different ones. People wait on line. Get to the counter and have not decided what they want. Yes, that was my wife in front of you, can't decide what doughnuts to buy not prepared to pay, and now is going to look for the coupon.