Quietest fridge?

April 1, 2008 11:22 AM

Our family room is right next to our kitchen, and our very old and noisy refrigerator is *right* next to our couch. Watching TV is turning into a volume-control nightmare. What is the quietest (North American) botton-freezer refrigerator I can spend my tax refund on?
posted by kilikina73 to home & garden (7 comments total)

I don't have a specific answer, but if your fridge is very old, I think that you will find just about any new fridge to be surprisingly quiet.
posted by winston at 11:29 AM on April 1, 2008

I recently bought a mid-grade Kenmore, and it hardly makes any sound at all except the occasional ice discharge.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 12:37 PM on April 1, 2008

We just put a GE Profile bottom-freezer fridge in our (new! yay!) kitchen and I love it. It does NOT have the water/ice dispenser on the door, FWIW; just an ice maker in the freezer that makes very little noise, very infrequently.

I'm actually sitting in the room right next to the fridge (with a half wall dividing us) and my computer is making more noise than the fridge.
posted by cooker girl at 1:25 PM on April 1, 2008

Temporary relief: in your situation I plugged it into a timer set to go on in an hour. One of those pins-in-a-dial kind. Instead of rotating the dial to set the time I'd turn it until it clicked off, and it would come back on in an hour. Blessed peace.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:40 PM on April 1, 2008

Look for a high efficiency rated fridge. The more efficient and better insulated
the fridge, the less it will need to turn its compressor on to re-cool.

Refrigerator manufacturing has made significant efficiency gains over the last ten, twenty years. So as a bonus, the new fridge will pay off its purchase price quite quickly through large cost reductions over the price of running the old fridge.
posted by Sitegeist at 4:54 PM on April 1, 2008

Citation needed for my comment above:

Refrigerators and freezers consume about a sixth of all electricity in a typical American home - using more electricity than any other single household appliance.

Fortunately, refrigerators have gotten much more efficient over the past 20 years. While there still is room for improvement, today's refrigerators use 60 percent less electricity on average than 20-year-old models.

If you have an old style, inefficient refrigerator, it may be costing you as much as $280 a year in electricity in areas with high electrical rates. That means that a new, more efficient model will pay for itself just from the energy savings alone.

Californian Energy Commission

This is relevant to your question as efficiency will closely correlate with quietness. Efficiency rating listings are easy to find for fridges, quietness listings much less so.
posted by Sitegeist at 5:23 PM on April 1, 2008

Far and away your quietest unit will be an absorption system (this unit will run on electricity as well as gas) though I'm unaware of any offered as a bottom mount freezer. However you could stack a dedicated freezer unit under a dedicated fridge.
posted by Mitheral at 6:02 PM on April 1, 2008