They’re ideal for kitchens, garages, dorm rooms, bedrooms, and offices. Whirlpool® small space refrigerators are available in top-freezer and bottom-freezer styles. Our bottom-freezer models have a large freezer door that swings outward with multiple drawers inside to help you fit and find items as large as a turkey. Create your perfect entertainment setup with wine fridges or beverage centerfrom Whirlpool brand.
Side-by-sides and top-freezer models were somewhat more prone to minor, nuisance-type problems like noise, broken shelves or handles, and flickering lights than French-door or bottom-freezer models. We can also tell you that just a small percentage of most fridge models we analyzed suffered from a major cooling failure—it’s uncommon. Similarly, in our reader survey, just 2.5% of respondents said that their current refrigerator had suffered a cooling failure. We think most counter-depth models from the brands we highlight above should work well for most people. Many people buy counter-depth fridges because that’s what fits into their kitchen.
More than half of the respondents in our reader survey said that reliability was one of the top three most important things they wanted in a new fridge. Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball that can predict which brand or model—or especially individual refrigerator units on sale today—will last the longest and have the Arctic King fewest problems. When you’re using a mini fridge for snacks and beverages in your dorm room or home office, you want something small. Since this is a convenience item, affordability is also important. After taking apart fridges and talking to expert technicians, we found that there’s little difference between mini fridges.
They do tend to cost a little more than standard-depth fridges with similar specs, likely because they’re less popular and viewed in some sense as being more upscale. Small models from smaller brands, such as the Magic Chef MCDR1000WE, start around $400. The customer ratings for these lowest-end fridges tend to be decent, though some models (like this retro-styled Galanz) seem more prone to cooling failures than a typical fridge. You can find even cheaper fridges, but they tend to be very small, almost like mini fridges.
In our reader survey, 24% of respondents said that their ice maker had jammed or completely broken, by far the most common hardware-based failure. That’s particularly notable considering that 17% of respondents didn’t even have an automatic ice maker in the first place or said that they didn’t think about this feature. Freestanding full-size fridges can be as cheap as $650 or cost thousands of dollars like some built-ins. Arctic King Since freestanding fridges are much, much more affordable, that’s the type that the overwhelming majority of people buy, so that’s what we focus on in this guide. GE has issued a recall of six French-door refrigerator models because the freezer handle may detach and pose a fall hazard to someone pulling the freezer door open. The temperature range of Danby’s refrigerators are between 32F-39.2F/0C – 4C.
But the list has plenty of other efficient models in other styles, as well. Counter-depth, in the strictest sense, means that a refrigerator is shallow enough to sit flush with typical cabinets or countertops, so roughly 24 inches from the front edge to the back wall. These “true” counter-depth models are almost always very expensive built-in units. We point toward a few notable top-freezer models in our section on budget-friendly fridges.