Bottom mount freezers.

November 23, 2005 5:29 PM

I'm buying a new refrigerator with a bottom mount freezer, and need some advice.

The freezer section comes in two styles - door style (with pullout shelves) and drawer style. I've never used either, so I'm not sure what the advantages are of one over the other. Can those with experience with both comment?

posted by Neiltupper to home & garden (12 comments total)

How big is your kitchen? Do you have room to stand in front of the door and then pull out the shelves? Do you really think you would use those shelves, or are you more likely to just dump everything into a bin? If you do dump everything into the drawer, will you hate sorting through it and never be able to find anything? It all comes down to your organizational style and the space you have.

In the end, we bought a regular top-mount freezer. We realized that the bottom-mount wouldn't work with our galley kitchen.
posted by acoutu at 5:51 PM on November 23, 2005

The main point of the drawer is that the cold air stays in it when you pull it out, since cold air sinks.
posted by smackfu at 5:58 PM on November 23, 2005

We have a bottom-mount freezer with drawers. We really like it, but as acoutu pointed out, we tend to just dump everything into the drawer (we don't keep a lot of frozen food). We especially like the double doors above in our particular model (Amana).
posted by cyphill at 6:41 PM on November 23, 2005

Do you have any pets? A friend of mine has the drawer-style and she complained of dog hairs in her ice cubes.
posted by phoenixc at 6:49 PM on November 23, 2005

A friend has a bottom-mount with a single drawer. If you're going to go with a bottom-mounted freezer, I'd definitely say it's the least awkward. Try opening both quickly in a showroom, and you'll see what I mean.

The only exception I can think of is if you're storing massive cuts of meat or three-gallon buckets of ice cream in there that might make the inertia of the door hard to deal with.
posted by Orb2069 at 6:49 PM on November 23, 2005

I have a freezer-on-the-bottom, with two basket-drawers. I love it. I can see and access most everything in the freezer easily. Much easier to deal with than the top-mount door style.
posted by shifafa at 7:07 PM on November 23, 2005

I have a freezer-on-the-bottom freezer with a wire mesh drawer, and a second wire mesh drawer. It is very convenient, even though it only houses a finite amount of ice cream. If anyone has a solution to that problem, I would be very interested.
posted by aubilenon at 7:23 PM on November 23, 2005

We have a freezer-on-the-bottom fridge, and ours is the kind with a door that opens and then a wire-mesh drawer inside. I like the door because there is still door storage, which means that I don't lose packages of frozen whatever (spinach, etc) in the back of the fridge. We didn't see a huge advantage to the drawer-bottom one when we were buying, but we really, really love this fridge. I will never have a conventional one again. (Our is a Kenmore, btw, nuttin' fancy, but very serviceable and exactly what we need for two people and two cats.)
posted by Medieval Maven at 8:20 PM on November 23, 2005

We had a bottom drawer freezer in our our fridge when I was a kid. I love them, in particular because I'm 6'2" and it effectively raises the refrigerated (i.e. not frozen) section up and makes it more accessible. Every residence I've had since then has come with a fridge, but someday when I buy one it'll be a bottom drawer type.

Swing out door? That's crazy.
posted by intermod at 8:22 PM on November 23, 2005

My favorite configuration for a freezer-on-the-bottom is two slide out shelves/baskets with door racks for small stuff. Of course, that only works if you have enough space to open the door all the way.

I don't like the one-deep-drawer configuration, as stuff always gets shuffled to the bottom/back of the drawer.

However, it really depends on how much room you have to open the door, and the form factor of the stuff you'll be putting in there.
posted by jlkr at 9:51 PM on November 23, 2005

Aubileon: eat the ice cream. Problem solved.
posted by acoutu at 11:10 PM on November 23, 2005

Another pull-out bottom drawer in my house. It's the best fridge I've ever used. Another nice feature of the double-basket drawers, beyond the ones already mentioned is that you use the whole freezer---no more mysterious items hiding at the back---since every part of it is in easy reach.

Oh and double-doors on top are great too.
posted by bonehead at 6:44 AM on November 24, 2005