We bought a new refrigerator last week, and boy what a luxury it is! Our old fridge was only 18 cubic feet, the classic style with the freezer on top. We chose a new LG brand, 25 cf, with “French door” style doors, and the freezer on the bottom as a drawer. The thinking goes, you don’t open the freezer a lot, so why put it at eye level and the most convenient location; while you constantly have to stoop to reach the often-accessed produce drawers at the bottom of the fridge?
It sure is nice, I enjoy it every time I open it! In this photo, we were due for a shopping trip, so the old fridge doesn’t look that crowded (in fact, most of what’s in there is ingredients for homemade dog food… :-)). But we had times where we couldn’t fit everything in there, on days when we had a lot of leftovers and cut up summer fruit for lunches. The new fridge has a better layout and fits a lot more stuff! And everything is much easier to see and find.
The other big upgrade is an ice maker- which is so nice on hot days when we drink a lot of ice water while working outside. Keeping the ice trays full was a several-time-a-day task before! Ah, technology!
In case you’re wondering…
The freezer-on-top design was intended to take advantage of cold air sinking. The cooling for the entire unit was actually done in the freezer, and the fridge’s cooling was all pretty much residual. Certainly not ergonomic!
Ah, makes sense. This design still takes advantage of that to some extent, it pulls the air from the freezer on the bottom and dumps it out at the top of the fridge compartment. The owner manual warns not to block the air exit vents in the fridge compartment, and also that because the two compartments share the same air, if you get a smell problem in one, it’ll be in both.
I was also interested to see that the coils on the back of the fridge are not exposed- it has a plain, smooth sheet metal back. That’s the fist time I’ve seen that.