[Longish post about the continuing trials and tribulations of a geeky little techno nerd trying to understand how to take care of a house of his very own.  Skip if talking about refrigerators is likely to bore the hell out of you…]

The trick to buying major household appliances like…well…the new fridge I bought last week, is to match them correctly to the scale of your life.  The problem is, at least here in Bigger-Is-Always-Better America, you need to have a life scaled to the expectations of American corporations.  Specifically, you need to have a large family living in a McMansion with a mortgage you can’t afford and two Hummers in the driveway.  Get that, and everything they want to sell you in the major appliances department…everything nice at least…will fit your lifestyle to a ‘T’.

The refrigerator problem I related last September…Here…came back last month.  I noticed frost forming yet again at the bottom corner of the freezer, which meant that the cooling coils were probably frozen up by then.  And sure enough the ice maker stopped working shortly thereafter.  Icemakers, as I discovered last time, have a thermal switch that won’t turn on until the temperature of the unit is cold enough to freeze water in a certain period of time.  I also had a thermometer mounted in the freezer this time, which allowed me to see exactly how much less efficient my freezer was getting by the day.

To get it fixed would have meant the third time since September that someone from GE has been out to fix it.  I don’t blame GE service, which at least here in the Baltimore area is very good.  But the fridge was more then 20 years old judging from the records left by the previous home owner, and had a lot of trouble when it was brand new.  Each time it was something else in the system that had failed.  First it was the thermostat.  Then the defroster timer.  Now for all I knew it was the defroster heater, or something else.  I could have had it fixed again but the fixes were starting to add up to the cost of a new one, and a new one would be much more energy efficient.  Especially if I bought one scaled more correctly to the life of a single guy.  But it was also money I really hadn’t wanted to spend just now.

I started doing some somewhat more in-depth research then I’d done last September, and quickly became shocked at the state of the art…or at least what I could see of it here in the U.S.  Fridges made in the last half decade appeared to be loud, cranky and a whole lot less efficient then advertised.  Consumer were complaining bitterly online about just about every brand, including the brands Consumer Reports says need the fewest repairs.  It took me a while to realize that those ratings were relative to each other, and not to other products.  Even U.S. made automobiles seem to be more reliable these days then refrigerators.

It made me almost want to just keep getting the old one fixed.  But old as it was, that wasn’t likely to be a less costly choice either.  So it seemed I was stuck with getting a new one.  But at least I could take the opportunity to get one more suited to the life I live.  

I’m a single guy, living alone, in a small Baltimore rowhouse.  I just don’t need a big family sized fridge like the one that came with the house.  That fridge was almost always nearly empty, except for the freezer.  I live so close to two really nice grocery stores that I almost always buy perishables the day I am actually going to use them, and then only just enough to use right away.  If I buy more food then I am likely to use in a week I end up throwing most of it away when it spoils.  Milk, cheeses, veggies, lunch meats…it all either gets used right away or I end up having to throw it out.  So I don’t buy much at any one time.  So the fridge is mostly empty most of the time.  Figure I was spending a lot of electricity just to keep the air in it cool, which has been an annoyance.

The freezer compartment however, was another story.  Between the TV dinners, french frys, onion rings and other deep fryer treats, fish, shrimp, beef and occasional ice cream treat it was almost always packed full.  It’s not just that I like meat.  It isn’t simply that I practically live out of the deep fryer some weeks.  It’s that the stuff in the freezer, so long as it stays frozen, stays good to use for months.  I purchase on a longer time frame for the freezer then for the stuff that gets put in the fridge.  And I really wanted more space to do that.  I’d been thinking about getting a small chest freezer now for some time.

So what I really needed, I decided, was less refrigerator and more freezer.  I could buy a much smaller sized fridge, and then pair it with a small chest freezer.  I had a spot in the basement where a small chest freezer would fit nicely and have a circuit all to itself off the main box.  The previous home owner had a second refrigerator there for his club room, which I gave to a friend shortly after moving in.  There is even a water tap there for an ice maker.  A small 5 sq foot chest freezer would do nicely in that spot.

On a hunch, I looked to see if they sold refrigerator only units.  That would have been ideal.  I found some but they were all second refrigerator units, for those families even a monster sized fridge just wasn’t big enough for.  They were even larger on the inside then the fridge I was replacing.

So I decided to go with a small top freezer unit.  The fridge section would hold everything I needed without wasting energy just cooling off empty airspace and the small freezer section could hold the icemaker, and be a staging area for the kitchen.  The chest freezer would be for long term bulk storage.  Whenever I saw a sale on meats and TV dinners, I could take advantage of it.  I could buy the bulk meat and fish items at Costco and have a place for it.  On an as-needed basis, I would periodically restock the fridge freezer with items from the basement freezer.

So now I had my specs.  I began looking around for something to fit them and it was frustrating.  Last September I wrote:

I could get a good, state of the art energy saver fridge, sized just right for a single guy, for around 850 to a thousand bucks.  Or I could get a decent low tech smaller one for about 300-400.  I figured if I was going to replace the fridge I might as well buy a good one, but money for one of the good ones wasn’t in the budget.

Well I could squeeze it out of the budget now, but alas I was completely wrong about getting a good one sized for the life of a single guy.  I could get a nicely built, nicely equipped fridge, but only at a size a large family would ever need.  And mind you, what I mostly desired was something that was built well.  The built-in gadgets would be nice…oh look, an ice dispenser, oh look, a built-in wine rack…but I wanted something built well first.  I like solid things in my life.  I want to reach out and touch the shelves and they fit well into their slots and don’t feel like they’re about to come apart in my hands.  I want to slide the snack tray and the veggie bins in and out and they move smoothly and don’t feel like they’re cheap plastic that’ll crack and break and I’ll always have to be replacing them.  I see stuff like that and I wonder how well the stuff I can’t reach out and touch and see is made.

But all I could find in small, single guy sized refrigerators, was cheap plastic crap on the inside and no nice extras, except the ice maker, which I guess is considered essential now in a refrigerator.  Some of what I saw was done more nicely to the eye then others, but it was still all low quality plastic on the inside.  I wondered how they did it over in Europe, where small scale living is fairly common, even for families.  I tried looking for some European brands, and some from Japan and Korea, but it seemed the only things that got exported to the U.S. were the family sized fridges and those were hugely expensive.

I tried looking around the appliance outlet stores.  There were places you could buy factory reconditioned units, or ones that had minor cosmetic damage, for a whole lot less.  But again, most of what I saw were the big McMansion style units.  The few small, single person units I saw all looked…a bit less then factory reconditioned.  More like second-hand and a tad cruddy more often then not.

Why aren’t you married with children citizen…?

One thing I discovered, in the nick of time since I was considering buying a stainless steel unit, is that fridge magnets don’t stick to stainless steel.  My fridges always get decorated with fridge magnets, reminders, letters and cards from friends.  I still have the Christmas card my first high school crush sent me a couple years ago, tacked to the fridge with a magnet I got in Monument Valley the summer before I’d found him again.  I started pocketing one of my fridge magnets on my shopping trips, along with the tape measure.

In the meantime, I’m eating out of the old fridge and not buying any new food to put into it so I don’t have any to spoil when I make the change from the old to the new.  It takes about a day, really, for the inside temperature in a fridge to stabilize and you don’t want to be putting food in until it’s cold enough, especially lunch meats and dairy products.  The freezer, which by this point was just barely getting cold enough to freeze food, but not freeze it really hard, took the longest to empty.  The fridge section not so much.  I emptied the snack bin pretty quickly.  The only thing I kept putting back into the fridge was the daily batch of fresh ice tea.  After about two weeks of it I was eating almost exclusively from local restaurants and eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was getting desperate.

I ended up buying a Kenmore fridge and small chest freezer from Sears.  The fridge wasn’t as horribly cheap on the inside as some, but it was still less well made then I wanted.  But by now I’d given up on getting what I wanted in the size I wanted it and this fridge was just exactly the right size.  It was also inexpensive since Sears was running a sale at the time.  It is small enough that instead of having a fan that forces air through a heat exchanger coil it has the old radiator style heat exchanger mounted on the back.  Since the whole unit is smaller, it can sit in the space where the old one did and get more air circulating around the back anyway, so that older passive air cooling mechanism shouldn’t be a problem at all.  Simpler is better, when you can manage it.  Or so I’m hoping anyway.  The freezer is a very small chest model that will require manual defrosting periodically.  Interestingly enough, the freezer is quieter then the fridge.

I let the units run for a day to stabilize temperatures.  Late in the evening the icemaker in the new fridge finally began making ice, so I knew the freezer was ready to hold food.  Which meant that the fridge probably was too.

So now I have a smaller fridge, and a chest freezer now, and a better balance of food storage here at Casa del Garrett.  To this I added one more thing: A small, self contained ice maker for the bar downstairs.  By self-contained I mean it drinks from its own built-in water tank, not a hookup to the household plumbing.  More on it later, but it’s part of a master plan to improve the bar for when I have company.