Is there a twenty year fridge on the market?

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roger

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Well our 17 year old Kitchenaid fridge died, and we were quite bummed because we spent close to $3000 for it and expected it to last at least 20-25 years.

The general consensus at all the dealers we went to was that home fridges today, regardless of the price you pay, are made to last around 10 years. Price differences reflect "convenience options"...but don't make the thing run any longer.

Does this sound correct?

All we want is a basic, solid, white, medium sized(15 feet), quiet fridge...no electronic gadgets, no ice-maker, no water-dispenser, etc.

Is there a "Speed Queen" of fridges out there?
 
Roger, in what way did it "die"? Unless its a sealed system failure I'd think it is well worth repairing.

There are many complications in modern refrigerators that can and will cause failures to happen more frequently then in older models. Perhaps even the sealed systems will not have the l-o-n-g lifespans of of the vintage units. Still I think any reputable brand should be good for 20 years with proper care and the occasional repair.

I'd accuse the dealers of fear-mongering stating a 10 year lifespan. Of course with manufacturers offering less long term support I suppose parts availability could be a problem.
 
Dead KitchenAid

I would agree with kbOnes. First you need to know what has happened. Also am I mistaken that you said this was 15 cu ft and you paid $3K for it 17 years ago ?
I think you over paid. Ed
 
Well, most folks would consider 10 years to be a pretty good run. There's really no incentive for a manufacturer today to make a product that would last as long or longer, and certainly only us 'enthusiasts' would hold a grudge over a failure after a decade of service. Kitchen remodels are almost more frequent and appliance failure provides many the perfect excuse. No sir, if you want a 20 year fridge you'll need to go back a few decades, but I'm sorry to say, most of those will last far longer than that! -Cory
 
My primary fridge is a 1957 Philco.  I had to replace the cold control, because it was freezing things in the refrigerator... Otherwise, it appears to have never needed repair.  Crazy.

 

My secondary fridge came with the house new in 2007 (a GE).  While it is 50 years newer, I had no issues until 6 months ago.  The freezer started thawing out, turned out I needed a new cold control.  I replaced that.  Now the fan in the freezer's bearings have gone bad and I have another repair to do.

 

I spoke to Dave/Volvoguy87 about it, to see about the part, as he works in an appliance shop.  He said that average life expectancy of a new fridge is 5-7 years.  

 

Fix what you have, if possible.  If not, shop around.  Modern stuff is junk.

 
 
My lady at Sear's said

"I don't have an appliance on this floor designed to last longer than ten years."

"If it doesn't have a catastrophic failure, you can bet the mfg. has pulled back parts."

She said she learned this after Whirlpool bought Kitchenaid home div. There were too many 30 year old Hobart Kitchenaids out there, so they stopped making the parts.
 
Had an Amana top of the line s/s lasted 11 years. Private repair company that I used said I was lucky to get 11 instead of 10 out if. There was a leak in the cooling system not worth fixing. So I guess its true. No new appliances are going to go as long as the old timers.
Jon
 
10 Years

Seems that this is the sweet spot for any appliance.  As a matter of fact, I have an Amana French-Door refrigerator that is close to 10 years.  It hasn't required a repair that I couldn't perform myself, so I am grateful for that.  However, I expect to replace it within the next six months.  It will become the beverage fridge in the garage or be forwarded on to Goodwill.

 

Malcolm
 
kb0nes,

I will get the fridge checked as soon as our good repairman comes back from vacation, we are just preparing for the worst case scenario.

We found that our fridge(20 ft, side-by-side model, with water/ice dispeser)had stopped running and a huge icile had formed from the bottom of the ice-maker all the way down to the freezer floor.

I turned the unit off, unplugged it, and left the doors open for about a day and a half. Then I turned it back on. It sounded loud and tin-can-y, but I left it running and came back a few hours later to find that it was running fine.

Wondering what the repair guy will say.

Ed,

I never said what fridge we had, only the type we are now looking for.

Our current Kitchenaid is a 20ft side by side unit with water and ice dispenser. It is just too big for our needs, and we don't really use the ice.

I'm in Canada, and the fridge was purchased when our dollar was only worth about 70 cents to your dollar (i.e. everything was 30%-40% more expensive)plus there is a 15% combined sales tax.

foraloysius,

Thank-you for the suggestion.

I had never heard of them before.

According to their website, the closest store that carries them is about 100 km away, but I go in that area often...so we'll be taking a look at them.
 
I am kind of surprised, but the Kenmore (GE-Built) fridge we have in the apartment in Montreal just turned 12! I guess we lucked out!!

I was used to changing the appliances in a house I rent out every 7 or 8 years then I got fed up... I bought a late 70s Viking side-by-side and put that in the house 6 years ago and it's still running strong.

If you'd consider a vintage fridge, I have a 57 GE wall-mount one for sale...
smiley-laughing.gif
 
We have a 14 year old GE at one house, and a 24 year old Whirlpool at the other, both have run with absolutely no repairs, and no sign of stopping anytime soon. We do make sure to vacuum out the coils and fans regularly though.
 
I always like hearing blanket statements from salespeople like "The average life of a new appliance is 5-10 years". This very well may be true, but it may not really be totally the fault of the appliance or its maker. Its the fault of our society to just throw good stuff away!

Even going back to vintage appliances that were made of heavier parts (note not always better) their time before needing service probably wasn't any longer, and may well be shorter then modern appliances. The difference was that people FIXED them then. All these 50 year old machines we love here are just kept running by people that are willing to do so. Certainly it is true that modern appliances are being made with more cost consciousness and the manufacturers are supporting them for shorter periods. This will likely cause shorter life spans. Still except for rare instances I can't imagine a refrigerator not lasting 20 years.

As for the OP's refrigerator problem that created this thread, its surely a defrost system failure, the sealed system is still fine. Fix it and it may well run another 10 years.

As an aside, Just the other day a buddy of mine at a coffee gathering asked if anyone wanted a "non-working" DVD player he was going to scrap. His wife said it wouldn't play a burned disc she made so she bought a new one. I got a free 2 year old Sony DVD player that works just fine. At the following week gathering I gave him $20 and thanked him.
 
I'd go commercial...

a True or Traulsen or equivalent will be our next fridge, with matching freezer. No, no ice maker, but we know of several folks whose ice makers casued thousands of dollars of damage when they sprung a leak, we will never will have one again. The commercial jobs are truly made to last AND to repair if something goes wrong. Sub-Zero and other glitzy domestic jobs are overpriced and mediocre, imho, CU gives them a lackuster rating for reliability.
 
Lo and behold, when we purchased out pair of F&P refrigerators (freezer AND fridge) we were given the "You'll be lucky if you get 10 years out of them").
Well, unless the stars aligned or we were very lucky, Matsushita/Panasonic quality has come through. 14 years and still going strong, no defrost heaters, timers, thermostats. The fridge will blow light globes regularly, so we have basically given up on that.

On top of that, our two backup models (a mis-matched pair) from CHINA, with something like a 1 year warranty, are still going strong 4 years later. Cheap, and nasty (The fridge light flickers and dips when you knock the cabinet, and its back cabinet cover is cardboard), it still works. Amazing, really.
 
20-year refrigerator

Try a Miele..... :-)
Is that 'Liebherr' Stateside?? Or Is Miele just a 'brand'?? I have no idea... Miele products are WAY out of my price range, but a good friend of mine is busy converting his kitchen/laundry to Miele in the firm belief that those appliances will outlast his lifetime... And he HAS done his 'homework' before making that decision.

All best

Dave T
 
What can a bus driver afford?

Surely a standard measurement such as number of hours say a bus driver has to work to pay for a year of service (capital cost maintenance running costs) could be established? I mean in 1960 for a bus driver employed in that year to buy and run a GE Filterflo for a year of its average life compared with a bus driver in 2011. In my limited personal experience there only seems to have been only a slight decrease in service years from appliances even though they have become more affordable by as much as more than a factor of ten in some instances.There is no doubt however there is not the expectation of repair but rather replacement (but on the plus side also not of regular maintenance).
 
Heat Rises

Certainly it would make sense from an efficiency standpoint to place the compressor/condenser where the reject heat can't find its way back into the cooled space. Above the unit or remotely would be preferable to underneath. My suspicion is that home units tend to have the condenser under the unit largely due to noise and because the who knows what will be above a home refrigerator. In a commercial kitchen there is usually lots of space above the unit. Home users like to store things on top their fridges...

The GE Monitor tops tend to run forever because they were massively overbuilt and very simple. With any new technology the initial engineering has lots of safety margin built in, there are too many unknowns at first. Its only after years of history and failure analysis that the design is streamlined to reduce cost to manufacturer. Had GE placed the condenser under the unit I think they would have run just as long, but they sure would have been harder to swap out the cooling system!

A commercial unit will likely have a longer service life compared to a residential unit, but I'm not convinced this is because they are better made. I have worked on some True units before and they were pretty crudely built. The fact that commercial units tend to just be simple and featureless just means there is a lot less stuff to fail. The other issues with a commercial unit are that they won't be as energy efficient and they will surely be noisier. If you are willing to live with those limitations then a commercial unit could give a long life at home though.
 
GE started making some fridges with the compressor below the cabinet in 1934 I believe. They have the same compressor as the monitor top. They're just as reliable as a monitor top.

Refrigerators, like any other major appliance, started as a simple utilitarian appliance. Simple appliances that lack fancy features usually last longer. If you take the money from those additional features and stick it back into the compressor and build quality, you would have a longer lasting appliance.

The main sales pitch to replace an appliance to energy efficiency. I had a kitchen designer suggest I replace my 1950's chest freezer with an under-counter freezer. He mentioned both efficiency and noise. I asked him how much one would cost. With a $1500 cost, how long would it take for me to see a savings? I mean seriously, that new freezer would be dead within 15 years and the chest freezer will probably be fine.

We have been conditioned as a society that appliances are now a part of decor. Once we tire of the decor, the room and the appliances go to the dump. Go ahead and apply "green" or energy star and the guilt of throwing away a good appliance magically disappears.
 
From my limited experience as a food worker and refrigeration technician, you do NOT want a commercial refrigerator at home, mostly because of the noise. You don't notice it in the chaos of a commercial kitchen when one is working but I would think the noise would keep you awake at night and these units guzzle energy - in a business, that is just the cost of doing business but for a consumer the electric bill would just be too much. I agree about True, they seem to have sharp edges and just scream "cheap!" but I do think they are rather expensive.
 
Traulsen

Top quality commercial coolers and freezers.  Very expensive but well worth it.  Another plus is that they are owned by Hobart who has the best national service and parts network hands down.  Also Hobart still belives in quality so the product is well made.

WK78 
 
Refrigerator Lifespan

My mom has 1954 Hotpoint. The only repairs done were replacing the glass shelf above the crisper drawers and changing a few broken shelf supports. It was moved 3 times since it purchased once to to be placed in storage while the house we were living was moved and kept in storage for the time when a new house was built on the same lot that we moved into in April of 1960. It was moved again in 1971 when new Armstrong Solarian was installed over the old oak plank flooring. She made it self defrosting using a Paragon defrost timer. Only problem with that is to remember to reset it when there is any power outage.
 
I've lived with 30-yr compressors all my life. Except for antique/classic and high-end commercial, those simply ceased to exist roughly 15 years ago. The guts just aren't there. Current life projections are 7-10yr and customers can easily come up short even on that.

Reckoning without all the flimsy little "features" that are lucky to make it out of warranty. Some recent models the doors can't even be made to align squarely.

It is not a good time in the history of appliances. JMO.
 
Bus driver

I am fairly sure that some calculations are undertaken by various Govt. departments on purchase/running costs of appliances versus wages as part of their cost-of-living / standard-of-living statistics. I have no idea how/where a digest of this information could be obtained, but it would make VERY interesting reading, Wilkinsservis. :-)

I also despair of our 'throwaway' society, Travis... And yes, of course a working machine which has already 'paid for itself' will always be cheaper than ANY replacement, but salesmen don't get commission on those... ;-)

As to '30-year compressors', my friend (the Miele fan), when he asked (in a local electrical goods shop) about a washing machine which would 'last 20 years', was asked by the sales assistant "Why on Earth would you want that?? You'll get fed up with it!" Such is the society we live in.... :-(

All best

Dave T
 
UPDATE...UPDATE...UPDATE

Well we managed to get in touch with our repairman.

Told us we did the right thing completely thawing the fridge.

Since things are back to normal now, there is no real point in him coming over(and charging us $90). If there truly is something wrong with a part of the defrosting system, it will act up again within the month. Call him then.

Very humid weather, putting hot food in the fridge to cool, stuff piled in front of the inside vents, doors not properly closed all can lead to excessive ice buildup inside the walls of the fridge itself and decrease its efficiency (making it work harder and costing more electricity)and can lead to the problem we had.

Frost-free or not, he suggests thawing the fridge at least one a year as a cheap insurance policy.
 

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