I chose a variety of price points, designs, and sizes of mini fridges to suit almost every budget and purpose. I even chose a mini fridge model with a Sabbath Mode for Jewish customers who observe strict rules about using electronics on the Sabbath and religious whirlpool mini refrigerator holidays. Look for exterior features that help you easily navigate a small kitchen, like reversible doors and counter-depth models. On the inside, shelves that slide back to make room for tall items help you use the same space for different purposes.
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The door has an alarm system that signals when it’s left open for too long. The mini fridge even has an over-temp alarm, which alerts you to when the unit is holding at temperatures over 45 degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours so you can troubleshoot issues and save your food from spoiling. You can easily adjust the internal temperature with the backlit touch control panel and even enable Sabbath Mode, which disables automatic lights and alarms for religious holidays and the Sabbath when electronics are prohibited.
As of early 2021, new LG refrigerators all use climate-friendly R600a refrigerant. Take multiple measurements of your space to find the maximum width, depth, and height. Seriously—take multiple measurements of each dimension in case your floors turn out to be crooked.
And LG doesn’t sell as wide a variety of that type of fridge as other brands do. But judging from the little info we do have, those models seem to be solid, too. LG’s bottom-freezer models also earned high marks in our reader survey. The shelving and organization in LG fridges earned especially high ratings in our reader survey, as LG beat the other major brands in satisfaction with perceived capacity, storage ability, and accessibility of contents. Among refrigerators from the five major brands, LG fridges seem to make their owners the happiest.
Having a small refrigerator in your dorm room makes it easy to keep fresh food and cool drinks on hand between classes or when you just can’t bring yourself to eat another meal in the dining hall. Mini fridges are Frigidaire fridge also great for use at home when you might need a bit of extra cold storage for groceries like meat, drinks, and vegetables. The LED interior light uses a motion sensor to automatically turn on as you approach.
The customer ratings for these models are solid and sometimes even great, though these owners are more likely than normal to complain about noise, lack of shelving, and lack of capacity. The barebones GE GTE17DTNRWW, for example, has an average rating of 4.5 stars on Home Depot’s site, beating out most side-by-side models, but a whopping 18% of recent reviewers write that it’s noisy. We also found through our survey and customer-review analysis that Whirlpool’s French-door and side-by-side reliability was similar to that of the other brands—although notably, the rate of major problems seemed especially low. As a brand, Whirlpool had the fewest complaints in our survey about truly bad reliability .
If you are set on a mini fridge, consider that it might be wise not to spend too much because of the shorter lifespan. Our recommendations above run the gamut of what we found to be a reasonable price range. The basic wire rack shelf is removable for easy cleaning, and the compact fridge has a chiller Arctic King for freezing a tray of ice cubes or keeping a small item or two frozen. The bare-bones design means there are fewer components to potentially break down. Frigidaire is a solid name in the refrigerator industry, and the 1.6-Cubic-Foot Compact Fridge is a great affordable, no-frills solution.