14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
impressed!
Date of Review: Apr 26, 2009
The Bottom Line: Looks good and performs well.
I wanted a stainless steel refrigerator sized right for my small kitchen, which can't accommodate a fridge wider than 32 inches.
I did a lot of comparison shopping on line and in stores, and ended up picking this flat-door Fisher and Paykel model (E522BRXFDU) with an interesting design of water dispenser in the door (the dispenser is very shallow, so takes up very little space). The whole appliance is 31 1/8 inches wide, but watch out for the deep and non-reversible doors, which need a good 2 1/2 inches of extra clearance to the left or right, depending on which side the hinges are on. The drawings on the manufacturer's website help, but bear in mind that if you only just have enough width for the refrigerator, it will need to stick out into the room several inches beyond kitchen cabinet depth to enable you to open the door.
The quality is very good inside and out (remember that most stainless front refrigerators have black enamel sides -- not this one; it has satin-finish silver that is a very close match with the doors).
The Active Smart cooling seems to live up to the manufacturer's hype. I don't hear the compressor running very often, but the temperature in both fridge and freezer seems fine. And the appliance is very, very quiet.
Inside the fridge, things are bright, thanks to the halogen interior light. There are no temperature controls on the interior (temperature is regulated by the display above the exterior water dispenser). If you are used to North American refrigerators, you may not like the shelf design, which is more European (full width glass, slide into runners in the cabinet sides, so less versatile than in US refrigerators with half-width shelves that mount in rails in the back of the cabinet). The shelves also have easily scratchable aluminum strips on front edges - more of a looks issue than anything else.
The bottom-mount freezer (not lit!) has smooth-gliding, removable, deep plastic drawers top and bottom. There are two shallow plastic drawers in between. The upper drawer is actually 3 separate bins, with the ice maker and ice tray taking up about 9 inches on one side. If you switch the ice maker off, you can use the bin underneath it for something other than ice, because the ice maker does not protrude downwards more than a half inch into the bin.
On the outside, the stainless finish (it's the real thing, not the lookalike) stays pretty clean, and fingermarks can just be wiped off. The water dispenser has an LCD display above it. This controls the temperature (with fast-chill settings available), switches the ice maker on and off and controls the amount of water that comes out of the dispenser at any one time (continuous fill or measured fill for anything from a cup to a jug). Unfortunately, the water/ice filter is external. Unlike some fridges, this one does not have a mounting for the filter inside or on the toekick area on the cabinet front. The filter comes with a plastic (not copper) water line and is not complicated to install.
Warranty is given as two years (the manual doesn't say anything about a longer warranty on the sealed cooling system, but I have read elsewhere that it's five years).
