BUYING
A FRIDGE FREEZER
"Can you help me please?" - A Co Down listener asked On
Your Behalf. "My freezer isn’t working! In fact it has
never really worked properly. It keeps thawing and re-freezing the
food in the freezer and the fridge isn’t keeping the contents
cold enough."
The Background
""It's just a standard
half-and-half fridge freezer. When I bought it the sales person
did ask me if I was going to keep it in a garage or an outbuilding,
but I said it would be in a kitchen."
So when did things
start to go wrong?
"Very soon after I got
it home, I realised that the top part of it was really just a cupboard
and the bottom half was frozen solid. So I rang the maker at the
number I’d been given and the engineer came out. He said it
needed gas in it! Very unusual for a new freezer. However it seemed
to work after that.
"After a while though,
I noticed that in the mornings that the fridge hadn’t been
on during the night."
The manufacturer's engineer
told her that the fridge is designed to operate within certain temperatures
and he measured the temperature in our listener’s kitchen
and said that it was below the temperature at which the fridge was
designed to work.
He told our listener that what
was happening was that during the night when the heat went off the
kitchen cooled down, and the freezer was stopping operating and
then when the kitchen warmed up again in the morning it started
up again.
He said this was within the
limits of temperature and the fridge freezer she had bought was
designed to work in this country so it was her fault that her kitchen
was too cold. Even though the house is double glazed and centrally
heated.
The Advice
Should she accept it? Hazel
Scott of the Belfast Consumer Advice Centre it was reasonable of
the maker to say that the kitchen was too cold, because fridges
and freezers are designed to work within specific temperature ranges.
So how do you choose the right
appliance?
If your kitchen gets very cold choose a SN climate class model.
These are designed to cope with rooms that get quite cold - around
10 degrees centigrade (that’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit ). The
N class model is designed for use in a room no colder than 16 degrees
centigrade
One or two controls - does
it matter?
There are two main types of fridge freezers - with one thermostat
control and with two controls. That should be simple, but it isn’t.
The difference is always that obvious in the shop.
What's the difference?
The two control model makes it easier to set the correct temperature
in the fridge and freezer compartments. And you can usually switch
off one compartment which is useful for defrosting the freezer.
Or perhaps you might want to switch off the fridge when you’re
on holiday. And a one control fridge-freezer may be more difficult
to set correctly.
If the temperature of the room
drops close to the temperature of the fridge, a one control model
may cut out and stop cooling.
This may be what has been happening
to our listener.
What questions should
ask when buying?
Not all sales staff are trained to give best advice on what is available
and what is suitable for different needs. And it is not up to the
shop to tell you! So do your homework before you buy.
|
