Introduction

Design & Usability

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This GE Adora not only hits all the standard design elements for a side-by-side fridge, it even throws in a few extras.

The front of this fridge has a shimmering stainless steel finish that's somewhat reflective, so prepare to be blinded a bit if your kitchen gets a lot of direct sunlight. The left door (freezer side) has a through-the-door ice and water dispenser. It also serves as the location of the appliance’s control panel.

When you open the doors, the interior for both sides is lit with blue LED lighting that gradually increases in brightness after a few seconds, giving your eyes time to adjust. After that, things get much more traditional. The only interesting feature here, aside from the humidity controlled Fruit & Vegetable drawer, is the Sealed Pan. It, too, has a humidity control, but it's designed specifically for containing messy items, such as meat when it's being defrosted.

The inside of the freezer feels a bit more cramped than the fridge. Near the top is the device that holds bulk ice, with a small section right above it that's just big enough to make it practical for storing items. Most of the shelves here are wire, so take care when storing small or loose items.

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Features

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With highly intuitive controls and reasonable accessibility, this fridge is very user-friendly for a side-by-side.

The shelves inside the compartments and on the doors are actually quite easy to access. Despite the narrowness of the two sections, the doors open wide enough that you should be able to get at any items without too much of a hassle. The ice maker takes up a fairly large portion of the freezer storage space. Any bulk ice that has been made can be accessed in one of two ways: You can either pull the ice maker out of the freezer completely, or you can simply lift the small flap located at the front and reach in.

The water dispenser is perhaps one of the smoothest-working features on the GE Adora. It operates using a single large paddle inside the cavity on the front of the freezer door. The cavity is tall and deep enough to fit even slightly larger drinking glasses with ease, though you’ll have to hold onto anything larger than that. The small light source makes getting a cool beverage on a hot summer night that much easier, as well.

Controls on the GE Adora strike an excellent balance between comprehensive and intuitive. There’s a thermostat which displays the temperature on a small screen, and separate buttons to make the fridge and freezer warmer or colder. In a pleasant twist, this fridge actually takes temperature display a step further. Not only does the thermostat tell you what degree you want it set to, it also tells you what the temperature inside your fridge actually is. If, for instance, you need to defrost some items or chill a baked good at a certain temperature, you can adjust the thermostat, then check back in a few minutes to see if the ideal degree has been reached; it's sort of a refrigerator equivalent to preheating an oven.

Performance

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Unusually poor performance in fridge and freezer, with temperatures fluctuating so much that food will likely spoil sooner than it should.

The fridge in the GE Adora was rather disappointing. The top and middle thirds of the fridge averaged just under the ideal temperature, though they did manage to keep fluctuation at a fairly decent low. The shift over time near the bottom was about the same; the difference here is that the overall temperature was just slightly higher. Produce is usually fine when it’s stored at a slightly warmer temperature than other refrigerated items, but there are other fridges that do a better job of this.

The exterior thermometer might have said the freezer was at zero degrees, but our test meters showed something quite different. At the top of the freezer, right near the ice maker, temperatures were a bit below zero, with a fairly sizable shift over time. Near the bottom, it was substantially warmer--still frozen, though--with a much smaller fluctuation over time. Side-by-side’s have traditionally had difficulties matching the temperatures at the top to those on the bottom, but this much of a gap is far larger than it should be.

To make matters worse, the moisture retention in this fridge's crisper drawer is very poor indeed. If you keep a lot of produce in your fridge at any given time, there are really three options to you: start buying less, eat it all quickly, or don't be surprised when you have to throw it out after only a few days of storage.

Conclusion

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Not worth the investment.

The GE Adora line is only found at Home Depot, but after we finished with our model, we found that we may have been better off leaving it there. With poor test results, high energy consumption, and sticky drawers, the DSHS6VGBSS turned out to not be worth the investment. On the plus side, at least that investment wasn’t too big. The MSRP for this product is just $1,499, putting it at the lower end of the price spectrum for side-by-sides, especially those with a stainless exterior. Even if you catch it on sale--a rare thing, since it's only found at one chain of stores--it still might be too much. Much in the same way that Kenmore’s exclusive deal with Sears limits sale opportunities, Home Depot is the only retailer selling this fridge and so price hunting is essentially pointless.

Science Introduction

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The GE Adora was disappointing in every test that we conducted. In terms of the data we collected, there’s nothing about this fridge’s performance that really merits any praise.

Temperature Performance

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Inaccurate, inconsistent...ineffective.

The temperature shift in the fridge wasn't as large as what we've seen in other models, but there was a definite increase in warmth at the bottom. Regardless of the shelf, though, temperatures fluctuated more than half a degree over time; it's far from great, but it's still not awful.

The freezer had a much larger gap from top to bottom, ranging from almost two below zero to about five degrees Fahrenheit. The shift over time was different depending on the section as well: the colder upper part shifted about one and a half degrees, with the bottom exhibiting a range of temperatures that stayed within just have of a degree.

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Moisture Retention

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Poor moisture retention doesn't bode well for your veggies... or your food bill, for that matter.

Despite turning up the controls to the highest humidity retention level possible, this machine lost an average of 0.23 grams of moisture per hour. At that rate, vegetables will start to wilt faster than they would in many other models that we’ve tested; any carrots that started out fresh could very well become shriveled orange toothpicks if you leave them in there too long.

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Freezing & Thawing

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A long freezing time means meats can suffer from reduced texture quality.

It took an unusually long time for the GE Adora to freeze our room-temperature test materials. Ideally, it would take no time at all to freeze an item, a technique referred to as “flash freezing.” That's simply not going to happen with a regular appliance, though, and the best we tend to see is a little over an hour. The GE Adora, however, took nearly twice as long as that—our materials only reached freezing after 1 hour and 54 minutes. This is long enough that frozen meats and other items could have a substantially reduced texture and quality when thawed.

The GE Adora’s freezer managed to keep food frozen after 36 hours, though it did get perilously close to breaking that degree barrier. If your appliance loses power for longer than that, you may end up having to throw out some formerly frozen items.

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Storage Space & Energy Efficiency

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This GE Adora has an average amount of fridge storage, as well as a deceptively large freezer.

Side-by-sides aren’t exactly known for being cavernous; the tall, thin compartments make for narrow storage space. That said, the GE Adora can fit 10.51 cubic feet worth of food in its fridge, an average amount. Unexpectedly, the freezer can hold an impressive 5.52 cubic feet worth of items, definitely above average for a side-by-side.

This GE Adora is a fairly large appliance and that bulk is very much reflected in its power consumption. Using a standard rate of $0.09 per kWh, we determined that it would cost about $67.40 to operate this appliance for a full year. Unfortunately, this GE Adora is not only expensive, it’s also not very good at distributing energy. Using 0.13 kW-h per cubic foot of space, it’s actually one of the less efficient appliances of its type that we’ve seen.

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Other Tests

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