Cool Kitchen Appliances
Hi Roger you will have fun with this project.
The GE Americana with the Sky-Light window was made for quite a few years, but went away as they rolled out the P-7 SC ovens as it would have been very difficult to incorporate this feature into a SC oven.
The refrigerator in this package is diffidently a modern model. The once a year defrosting that is necessary with a two door manual defrost is not anywhere as bad as manually cleaning a dirty oven, but it was very hard to convince many consumers to do it. Defrosting a freezer is a fairly simple job that involves no hard scrubbing or dangerous chemicals, and it is never a bad idea to go through your freezers inventory once a year. To me it was sort like having a manual transmission on a car, but a large #s of consumers will not have one at any cost.
The good thing is that a newer FF refrigerator will use about 1/2 the energy of a period correct GE Combination, and decent new [ simple ]refrigerators easily have a life span of around 30 years.
These first GE drop door DWs were OK performers, when they first came out CRs was fairly impressed, the reason they fell so much in the ratings by 1966 was that KA, Westinghouse and Whirlpool had redesigned their machines and all three of these left GE in the dust.