Fisher Paykel E522BRX 17.6 Cu. Ft. Bottom Freezer Stainless Steel Review

Introduction

Front

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This appliance has a stainless steel finish, with the larger fridge door on top and the smaller freezer door on the bottom. Handles are located on the far left, with the control panel and a through-the-door water dispenser located on the right of the fridge door.

The reflectiveness of the {{product.brand.name}}'s surface prevents you from seeing any of the fingerprints or smudges on the exterior finish. Step off to the sides, though, and you'll notice more than small amount of dust and smears. If you plan to go into your fridge a lot, you'll end up spending a lot of time cleaning it, too, unless you want to perpetually shine a light directly at it.

The control panel, which operates everything in the appliance, is located on the fridge door, and is operated using a series of buttons that cause the panel to illuminate when in use.

The slim, steel handles are located on the front left of the doors. Unlike more traditional bottom freezers, the fridge handle doesn't extend all the way to the top of the fridge door. Also, the bottom freezer compartment has a door that opens as opposed to a pull-out drawer, with a handle that matches the top one. Buyer beware, though - if you wants handles on the other side, you'll have to place a special order. These doors aren't reversible.

The door dispenser only produces water, operating using a push panel. The dispenser is only slightly indented into the door, meaning you'll have to hold on to your glass when getting a drink.

Interior

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The fridge is found on top, with the freezer compartment below it. Storage space is found in both main sections, but only the fridge door has shelf space.

The interior of the {{product.brand.name}}'s fridge is broken up into four full-width shelves, as well as a pull-out rack with two buckets in lieu of more standardized crisper drawers. The fridge also comes with a removable bottle rack.

The water filter is one of this refrigerator's most bizarre design features. The filter connects an external water hose with the one found behind the lower cover on the back of the appliance...but the actual filter is stored outside of the machine!

The fridge door is broken up into six sections. At the very top are two identical dairy bins, and at the bottom are two full-width shelves with an adjustable divider. Between these are two half-width shelves set side-by-side, which come with removable egg tray inserts. These can be removed to create regular door storage, or can hold up to one dozen eggs each.

The interior of the freezer is broken up into four sections. At the top is a very shallow tray that is just deep enough to hold an ice cube tray, which is included with the fridge. Below this is a pull-out tray with two plastic compartments, another shallow tray perfect for wide items like frozen pizzas, and a bucket drawer below that at the bottom.

The freezer door works only as a seal to keep in cold air. There is no storage space available because there are no shelves.

The ice maker is located in the rear upper left corner of the freezer compartment. It's hard to see, and even harder to get to. Fortunately, you don't normally need to get to it - It's controlled using the console on the fridge door, and only dispenses bulk quantities of ice. The {{product.brand.name}} comes with a large ice bucket that can be removed to either access the ice or when the device isn't being used.

Back

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A solid piece of white plastic covers almost the entire rear of the fridge. A small white, removable cover is fitted over the bottom portion, which needs to be removed to access the inner working of the appliance, as well as the cables for the water filter.

Sides

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Counter-depth fridges have sides that aren't quite as deep as standard models. This means that in a smaller kitchen, a fridge this size can be placed flush to your counters. Even though the sides of the {{product.brand.name}} have a smooth, gray finish designed to match the stainless steel front, you won't see have to worry about seeing them stick out into the center of the room. Counter-depth fridges are priced the way they are to give your kitchen a nice streamlined look without having to spend exponentially more money on a built-in model.

Running Cost

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This fridge certainly isn't the largest model on the market, landing somewhere between truly compact fridges and larger, full-sized models. Appropriately, its energy cost falls somewhere between very cheap and more expensive, costing about $35.65 per year to operate using our standardized pricing scale of $0.09 per kW-h.

Power Use Per Cu Ft

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The {{product.brand.name}} not only has a fairly low operating cost, it also manages to use the consumed electricity very efficiently. Per cubic foot of usable space, this appliance uses just 0.09 kW-h of electricity, making this both an economically and environmentally friendly fridge - neither energy or money will be wasted here.

Fridge Temperature

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The {{product.name}}'s temperature remained very consistent over time, but suffered from increased warmth in temperature the lower you go. The middle of the fridge managed to keep food at about 37 degrees Fahrenheit, the ideal temperature for food storage. The top of the fridge ran about two degrees colder, and the bottom ran about two degrees warmer, meaning the air is warming up as it falls. While this isn't perfect, you can make accommodations by storing food that's more perishable at the top of the fridge, with more durable items like Jello and juice, at the bottom

Freezer Temperature

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The freezer also remained very consistent over time, providing nearly perfect freezing temperatures throughout the entire compartment. When the internal defrost cycle kicked in, the temperatures did manage to go up a few degrees, but never enough to effect the quality of the frozen food stored there. Aside from the defrosting periods, temperatures never fluctuated more than a degree, meaning your food should be well preserved and kept safe from developing freezer burn.

Vegetable Drawer

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The crisper drawers on the {{product.brand.name}} have a rather unusual design. Many standard fridges have two drawers, independent of each other, than can be opened or closed individually. This fridge, however, has two nonidentical buckets that sit in a single pull-out tray the entire width of the fridge. This means every time you want to get into one, you have to get into both, though both still manage to have individual humidity controls. While this rolling tray allows for easy access and even easier cleaning, it doesn't result in fantastic moisture retention. The {{product.brand.name}}'s crisper drawers lost about 0.21 grams of moisture per hour, an average amount for many mid-level fridges. If your dietary emphasis is on fresh fruits and vegetables, this fridge isn't going to be friendly on bulk purchases. If you eat your produce not long after you buy it, though, it should still be relatively fresh and crisp.

Power Loss

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Food was still frozen after the 36 hour testing period where we unplug the appliance. The cold air was more than adequately contained, keeping the food inside secure for hopefully much longer than it would take for your local power company to fix any sort of outage.

Freezing Performance

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Our temperature sensors are inserted into artificial food that is kept at room temperature, then inserted into the freezer compartment. Were we using actual food such as raw meat, the goal for the appliance would be to bring it down to freezing as soon as possible in order to lock in and preserve the greatest amount of freshness and nutritional value. The {{product.name}} managed to bring our items to freezing after only 1 hour and 6 minutes - a fantastically short amount of time! It may not be flash freezing technology, but this unit dropped the temperature so quickly that your food should taste fantastic when thawed...as long as it was in good condition when you froze it in the first place. The icing on this frozen cake is the presence of the "super chill" - this setting makes your freezer extra cold for 12 hours when activated, resulting in even faster freezing. The users manual recommends this for freezing larger amounts of food, perfect for when you shop for meat at the wholesale store.

Usable Space

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Taking into account the space taken up by shelves and drawers, the {{product.brand.name}} manages to offer 8.72 cubic feet of usable space in the fridge compartment. The main section of the fridge offers the greatest percentage of storage space, spread out over four full-width shelves and two crisper drawers. Since the bottle rack is such a specialized feature, we didn't include it in our calculations, so you'll have slightly less space if you decide to use it.

The {{product.brand.name}} offers some pretty substantial storage options on its fridge door, as well. Two dairy bins means you can keep your butter separate from your cream cheese, and the half shelves are perfect for small condiments or storing eggs with the optional inserts. The bottom two shelves are ample enough to fit liter bottles of juice and soda, and all of the shelves (including the bottom half of the dairy bins) are adjustable.

The freezer offers a grand total of 2.69 cubic feet of usable storage space. Keeping in mind that the {{product.brand.name}} isn't a large fridge overall, that's small but not terrible. The two buckets on top (especially without the ice tray) serve up some options for organized storage. The thin, middle shelf is good for microwavable dinners or frozen pizzas, and the lower bucket is big enough to accommodate either large quantities of items or that plump turkey you've been keeping your eye on for Thanksgiving. The top-most tray is really only usable for ice cube trays, so we decided not to include it in our calculations.

The freezer door only serves as a cover to keep cold air in. No shelves means no storage space.

Below are the manufacturers own figures for capacity, and our own measurements for usable capacity. The manufacturers figures do not take account of the shelves, drawers and other removable features, but our measurements do account for the space these take up.

Ease of Access

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The wide-open shelves in the fridge offer ample storage space that is relatively easy to get to, no matter where you put your food. The pull-out tray for the crisper drawer slides smoothly, though the fact that you have to open the entire thing even if you just want something out of one compartment may be a bit of a hassle. The freezer drawers aren't quite as smooth as the crisper, and the ice tray comes out so easily you may accidentally pull it clear out of the freezer, but the large buckets and easy-to-grip handle indentations make up for those small flaws. Door shelves are also easy to get to, but the dairy tray lids don't stay up by themselves, an inconvenience if you're trying to get out more than one thing from the fridge at a time. Lastly, the fact that the water filter is stored externally near the back of the appliance means, depending on how your kitchen is set up, that you may have to move the entire fridge every time you need to change the filter, a factor that may cause you to just use the tap.

Controls

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The control panel, which operates everything in the appliance, is located on the fridge door, and is operated using a series of buttons that cause the panel to illuminate when in use.

The control panel isn't really all that intuitive. A lack of labels on the buttons may cause some confusion, though once you can remember which button cycles through the functions and which ones actually alter the fridge settings, you should be fine. Be sure to read the user's manual, though - some of the more unique functions, such as the bottle chiller and the super freeze, aren't explained on the console. The bottle chiller, which sounds fancy, is just an alarm that you can set when you want to freeze a drink but are worried about forgetting about it.

Water Dispenser

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The water dispenser is only a small indentation on the front of the door to the fridge portion of the appliance. It is operated using a paddle which feels cheap and unresponsive as compared to the larger, sturdier paddles found on dual water and ice dispensers. Presumably to prevent storage space reductions on the fridge door, the indentation is minimal, meaning you won't be able to rest your glass while filling it.

Ice Maker

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The ice maker is located in the rear upper left corner of the freezer compartment. It's hard to see, and even harder to get to. Fortunately, you don't normally need to get to it - It's controlled using the console on the fridge door, and only dispenses bulk quantities of ice. The {{product.brand.name}} comes with a large ice bucket that can be removed to either access the ice or when the device isn't being used.

Cleaning

Noise

Other Features

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Conclusion

Energy Efficiency

The {{product.brand.name}} manages to keep energy costs from getting too high. It uses the energy consumed very efficiently, even allowing for its smaller size.

Performance

The freezer offers some excellent performance, keeping food at an even temperature and bringing items from room temperature down to freezing in a fantastically small amount of time. The fridge has some issues with temperature consistency, though, but nothing that can't easily be counteracted through careful placement of quickly perishable items. Alas, the crisper drawers only performed adequately.

Storage Space

For a counter-depth appliance, the fridge manages to offer a fair amount of storage space. It's nothing compared to a full-sized fridge, but for what it is, consumers shouldn't have trouble find space for their food unless they're trying to accommodate a family of 6. The freezer, however, is rather small, so people who like to stock up at wholesale stores on meats, fish, and pizzas for the long haul may find that space is at a premium.

Usability

As long as you don't want to move shelves around too much, this fridge should work out just fine. Wide open shelves are easy to get at, drawers slide smoothly, and the controls are easy to use once you get past the slightly steep learning curve. The water filter being stored externally, though, is the biggest hiccup. It's almost not worth the benefit of having a filter if you have to move the whole fridge every time it needs to be changed.