Having a small refrigerator in your dorm room makes it easy to keep fresh food and cool drinks on hand between classes or when you just can’t bring yourself to eat another meal in the dining hall. Mini fridges are also great for use at home when you might need a bit of extra cold storage for groceries like meat, drinks, and vegetables. The LED interior light uses a motion sensor to automatically turn on as you approach.
(That’s counting the handles in both cases, but not the 2 inches you should leave between the back of the fridge and the wall for circulation). The doors aren’t flush with cabinetry like those of a “true” counter-depth model, but the overall design tends to feel less obtrusive Arctic King than a standard-depth model, which can jut way out beyond your cabinets. It’s common among models of both types to have separate cooling systems for the fridge and freezer compartments , which their makers advertise as an upgrade over the single systems used in most fridges.
The customer ratings for these models are solid and sometimes even great, though these owners are more likely than normal to complain about noise, lack of shelving, and lack of capacity. The barebones GE GTE17DTNRWW, for example, has an average rating of 4.5 stars on Home Depot’s site, beating out most side-by-side models, but a whopping 18% of recent reviewers write that it’s noisy. We also found through our survey and customer-review analysis that Whirlpool’s French-door and side-by-side reliability was similar to that of the other brands—although notably, the rate of major problems seemed especially low. As a brand, Whirlpool had the fewest complaints in our survey about truly bad reliability .
Looking to past performance also can’t account for changes in the way refrigerators are currently manufactured. We’ve learned from talking to manufacturers and touring appliance factories that components and processes and employees can change as often as every few weeks, yet the product’s model name remains the same. In other words, today’s fridge might not be whirlpool mini refrigerator exactly the same product as last month’s fridge, and there can be bad batches. You can spend a lot more than $4,000 on a fridge if you’d like to. At these high prices, you can find plenty of notable brands, some of which are sub-labels of the major brands, like JennAir , Monogram , Thermador and Gaggenau (both under Bosch’s parent company, BSH), and Dacor .
But maybe that’s because the brand’s slightly higher prices discourage people from buying the truly lowest-end models, so they don’t drag down the overall rating. Whirlpool’s reliability for this style also seems to be a little better than that of the other two brands. But we just don’t have enough data to say how these Whirlpools compare to similarly priced models with comparable features from LG or Samsung, so we don’t want to endorse one brand over another.
This compact pick by Costway comes with a crisper drawer, so you can enjoy your Trader Joe’s goods for as long as possible. It also comes with a separate freezer compartment and includes an ice tray so you can keep drinks cool on the go or while chillin’ in your room. Mini fridges are great for offices, dorms, recreation rooms, and so many other places, but it’s important to know that they are built economically, and you can’t expect to get more than five years out of even a good one.
Mini Fridge with Top Freezer has an interior light for spotting exactly what you need inside. Emily Belfiore is a Buying Guides writer for Meredith brands including InStyle, People, Food & Wine, and more. Always in pursuit of the best reviewer-vouched products, she covers topics spanning across the fashion, beauty, and health and wellness Frigidaire fridge verticals. In her free time, you can find her testing products for articles, watching beauty tutorials, or catching up on the latest binge-worthy show. Take a look at your school’s housing policy to find out what dimensions are acceptable (many schools require ones that are 5 cubic feet or smaller, though some max out at 3.5 feet).