Sunday, December 31, 2006

Happy New Year

It's New Year's Eve and for the life of me I don't know where 2006 went. The older you get the faster the time goes.

Today my time is devoted to organizing and setting up a new gadget. My present from my hubby this Christmas included a new refrigerator. He spent hours on line and checking out appliance stores all over Los Angeles. I was very picky about what I wanted. Firstly it could NOT be a GE nor Kitchenaid. Why? Well my old refrigerator was a GE and proved to have many problems with insulation which should not have occured. A couple of times a year my hubby has to get use a blow dryer to melt all the ice formed in the back of the freezer compartment (self defrosting?- should be but is not. My neighbor recently bought a Kitchenaid and has had the worst experience with their customer service department and service. She has had it for almost a month with numerous service visits already and it still doesn't work yet they refuse to replace it with another one- lemon. They insist on trying to fix it with wasted time overseeing service personnel who still can't get it working. It was brand new and not refurbished when she got it.

My other prerequisites included that it had to be stainless steel with french style doors. I needed at least 25 cubic feet of space and I preferred not to have the ice maker and water on the outside(to decrease potential service problems), but as manufacturers and appliance stores seek to milk you for all they can get, they only stock those with these bells and whistles. Yea, you can get those without but then you have to wait for the order to come in and we didn't plan this early enough in advance. Did I mention that my current refrigerator was on it's last leg?

While looking at what's available in the marketplace, we found out that Maytag manufactures most of all the brands out there including Amana and some Vikings just to name a couple. When you look at the guts, they are all alike with just a name plate on the outside to separate high end from low end pricing. Consumer reports indicate the Maytags/Amana in the french style were higher rated. I read some poor reviews regarding the exhorbitant amount of space the icemakers take up in most refrigerators, but then I'm not into ice cube trays.

What did I get? A Maytag Ice2go.




















Refrigerated area












Freezer compartment














Refrigerated area filled

Freezer compartment filled to capacity

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice. I never tire of appliances for gifts, especially if I've requested them. I have the GE French Door and love it to death. Especially when I'm entertaining. I can pop in trays with room to spare.

ctoshio said...

very nice frig when you come back to work you can tell us all where the best place to buy is at

Anonymous said...

I hope that you do not have the service nightmare with Maytag that I am in the middle of... In the last year I have had to have service people out here to fix it 4 times. Now the condenser has quit working and the freezer has cracks in the lining that they claim they can repair by "patching" it. Can't believe the run around I have had with them over this machine. I will never purchase anything from Maytag again!!

sylvie1950 said...

Fingers are crossed. Looks like from all the bad service reports, no refrigerator marketed in the US is great. I have to go with the odds based on Consumer Reports for the French style refrigerator. At the top are all the refrigerators manufactured by Maytag (i.e. Amana, Viking, etc).