Refrigerator-Guide.Com

Your Guide To Selecting, Using and Maintaining Refrigerator

Considerations when selecting a refrigerator

Door Designs

Single Door refrigerator features a single door, with a built-in freezer compartment. The freezer usually has another door to itself inside.
Double Door refrigerators have two doors, one for the freezer and the other for the refrigerator. Doors may be arranged on top of each other or side-by-side. There are also the ones with a bottom freezer unit. The top freezer refrigerators are popular choice and usually cost less to buy and operate than refrigerators with side-by-side doors. Bottom freezers are generally cheaper to operate, but usually cost more.
Triple Door designs have a freezer, a refrigerator and a third compartment, the use of which varies with each design.

Refrigerator Size

Family Size - For a family of two, a capacity of 150 - 200 liters is ideal. If your family have 4 to 5 members, then a 200-300 liters capacity is suitable. For family of 6 and more then you will usually need a refrigerator with capacity more than 300 liters.
Shopping Habits - If you shop regularly, a small capacity of around 150-200 liters should be good enough. If you only shop once a week then a larger capacity of 300 liters or more is more appropriate.
Eating Habits - If you are a vegetarian, you may consume less freezer space and more refrigerator space to store fruits and vegetables, while a meat eater may require more space in the freezer to store fish and meat.

Defrosting Mechanism

Manual Defrost - For this mechanism, both the refrigerator and the freezer need to be defrosted regularly by switching off the power supply manually.
Auto Defrost - In auto-defrosting refrigerator, the refrigerator compartment is defrosted automatically, but the freezer has to be defrosted manually by using the "auto defrost" switch in the refrigerator.
Frost-Free - These models have a built-in mechanism that takes complete care of the ice build-up in the freezer. Frost-free refrigerators are more convenient, but cost more to run and are slightly costlier than that of the auto defrost ones.