Reports by Consumers

Is it all for style, or is it at all practical? As with many other practices in Japan, lack of space is a real issue that needs to be addressed. A fat, round watermelon can take up a lot of room in a refrigerator, and round melons roll around on the refrigerator shelves. It's easier to pack, transport and store squared melons.

Sometimes appliances die. Sure. But we baby boomers grew up in a world where major ones, like refrigerators, died maybe in 20 or 30 years, if ever. I’m going to chronicle my sad personal saga as it happens–a good thing to do with a corporate blog if you can tie it to how your customers will never experience this kind of thing with your company.

Paper of all types, plastics, textile, rubber, leather, wood or garden waste fall under the category of organic waste whereas the inorganic fraction includes glass, crockery, tin, cans, aluminium, metal and dirt. There are also other waste components that require a different kind of handling. These include items such as radios, television sets, cordless phone battery, refrigerators, washing machines, furniture and household hazardous waste like batteries and light bulbs.

Well humans will not like things in their vicinity to be as intelligent but the idea of smart refrigerators does not sound a bad one. Will you like to get an SMS stating which peanut butter you should not buy, whether the milk in the refrigerator is out of date or not and there is a need for a new carton?

So Home Depot probably sells a lot of home appliances. Dishwashers, refrigerators and the like. Forget about the general terms like those, they aren’t anywhere to be seen. When users start the search for a home appliance, they are going to start with a more general term. They will narrow it down later to a model. Home Depot doesn’t start in the beginning of the search cycle, leaving that completely untouched. Fine, let’s say Mr. Customer has narrowed down his choices to a “Maytag Jetclean Dishwasher”. Since they have a whole page dedicated to this product, I’m thinking at least top five is where they should be.

Just how does a video recorder work? And how about fax machines, cars, washing machines, electric light, telephones, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators? You'll find the answers here. This site is designed as a companion to the TV series 'The Secret Life Of Machines' written by Tim Hunkin, and presented by Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod.

We have not had power since 9 p.m. Thursday night. We are lucky to have an extensive family here in Buffalo and many resources to draw on. After borrowing two generators from several brother-in-law’s friends in Rochester we were able to power the sump pump and refrigerators and my brother-in-law from Williamsville was able to do the same. We got on the list for buying a generator and then hooked up my father-in-law’s oxygen machine (he has tanks, but you get nervous about running out!). We now still do not have power, but the generator has been hooked up to power the furnace. The house had been down to about 55 degrees. When I left for work it was up to about 60 degrees. It’s a sunny day, so that should help bum it up a few degrees.

Some front-line units continue to operate out of spartan outposts where a hot meal is a luxury and flush toilets unknown. But growing numbers of troops live on giant installations complete with Wal-Mart-style post exchanges, movie theaters, swimming pools, gyms, fast-food eateries (Subway, Burger King, Cinnabon) and vast chow halls offering fresh-baked pies and multiple flavors of ice cream. Troops increasingly live in dorm-style quarters (called “chews,” for “containerized housing units”) complete with TVs, mini-refrigerators, air conditioning/heating units and other luxuries unimaginable to previous generations of GIs.

Case in point: thousands and thousands of user manuals for consumer products ranging from calculators, to blenders, to air conditioners. Mobile phones, computers, TVs, and refrigerators. You name it. Wow.

Did you know that your friendly refrigerator has a voracious energy appetite? It is, by far, the single biggest consumer of electricity in the average household, responsible for 10-15 percent of the electricity you use each month. Older refrigerators, as a rule, are far less efficient than the newest ones – as much as 50 percent more efficient in many cases. But buying a brand-new, energy-efficient refrigerator is almost certainly not in the cards for most of us. Fortunately, other things will help. Don’t set the thermostat too high. Even 1 degree will make a big difference. If your refrigerator is near a heating vent, or always in the sun, then change the location, cover up the heat vent near it or drape the window.

On the other hand, they got your new-fangled electrical refrigerators, too. For $4700. I had always wondered where you get some of those high-end appliances. Now I know. Too rich for my taste.

Informational parenthetical: quite simply put, refrigerators work by extracting heat from the air inside them and putting it outside. That’s why the back of your fridge is hot. Until now, that heat’s been wasted. Well, with the Hot Fridge, a creation of Hae-jin Kim, you could conceivably give your fridge dual use and keep things hot, as well as cold. It would do this by placing the “back of the fridge”, on top, where a special hot food storage compartment would be placed.

This got us onto a discussion about refrigerators, and the problems that men have with finding various things in them. Basically, if an item isn’t on the HIGHEST shelf, in the FRONT row, men will not see it. So, I started thinking about ways to make it easier for guys to cope with those gaint iceboxes that hide all of our sustenance.

Initially I wanted to find refrigerator reviews on some of the models that I have short listed. Unfortunately, this kind of resource is rather hard to come by. It is easier to find a DVD player review than a refrigerator review. Most of the reviews are done and hosted by first world countries. I found no such resource for Malaysia. I quickly abandon this task. Maybe I did not find hard enough, then again, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this either.

There is so much health and nutritional information available that it is simply overwhelming. Significant amounts of it are contradictory and subject to change with the next released study. Pretty much everything in our pantries or refrigerators will supposedly kill us. This can lead to a lot of guilt, especially if you are a Christian and have people lecturing you about your body being a temple.

Of course they have: their GE Profile Arctica™ ENERGY STAR refrigerators (graphic at top of post) use 53% less energy than models manufactured before 1993. And don't forget that GE snapped up Enron's wind turbine division in the wake of the latter's chimeric crash, an aquisition even the most fossile among investors can't help but see as smart.

I'm sure couples everywhere are eagerly awaiting vacuum cleaners that cannot be used by the same person twice, and that will not shut off until until a room has been thoroughly vacuumed; refrigerators that will, once every month or so, refuse to release their contents until someone other than the person who cleaned them last cleans them, and similar appliances. Isn't technology wonderful?

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) granted a petition for a new standard for home refrigerators in a letter released yesterday. The petition, submitted by a diverse coalition including state governments, utility companies, consumer and low-income advocacy groups, and environmental and energy efficiency organizations, requested that DOE commence a rulemaking to strengthen an existing national standard.

"We are very pleased DOE has granted our petition," said Steven Nadel, Executive Director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). "DOE's action recognizes the enormous energy and dollar savings at stake in making home refrigerators more efficient."

"It is encouraging that DOE has granted our petition," said Mel Hall-Crawford, Energy Projects Director for Consumer Federal of America (CFA). "Refrigerators are a major consumer appliance. We look forward to a process that clearly looks at establishing strong, cost effective energy efficiency standards for residential refrigerators that will benefit consumers."

Most major gas or electric appliances such as refrigerators, washers and dryers require special servicing to ensure safe transportation. All parts should be professionally secured prior to transport. Gas appliances in particular need professional disconnection and reconnection.>

On India’s part, China already represents a threat: China already has a marked global superiority in offshore manufacturing. It produces nearly 50% of the world’s refrigerators and television sets and about 30% of its washing machines. And a great deal of its products go to India.

Commercial refrigeration manufacturers and energy efficiency advocates announced today that they have reached an agreement on consensus federal equipment efficiency standards for commercial refrigerators, freezers, and refrigerator freezers used in restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and other commercial buildings that, if enacted by federal regulators and Congress, will avoid the need for 2 new 300 MW power plants.

The second picture is of the new kitchen. You will notice a large oven, a dishwasher, and ample floor and counter space. What you don't see in the picture is the three refrigerators and the additional counter space to the left of where I took this shot. (If you look closely, you'll see the bread and salad that accompanied my lasagna.)

We still don’t have a refrigerator. The second one that came proved to have case parts that extended beyond the width of our doorways and couldn’t be removed, contrary to what the salesman had told me when I went, tape in hand, to pick out a fridge that would fit. We “fired” that appliance store and are now proceeding with a new two-part plan. First, I’ll get my crowbar and remove some of the trim from the offending doorway so we get another inch or two of room. Second, I think we’ll try Sears. From what our next door neighbor told me, their installers seem likelier to attempt creative solutions to get appliances into rooms.

I’ve always found Martha extremely reliable. If you want to, say, clean your refrigerator, someone from her staff will have talked to several major refrigerator manufacturers, people who clean refrigerators for a living and representatives of refrigerator-cleaning products, did every available bit of reading on the subject, tried out different methods on a few dirty refrigerators, then sat down to write advice on the subject that would be difficult to improve on. And anyone who thinks this is counter-feminist is living in some dream world where refrigerators clean themselves.

I saw everything from $3,000 bar-b-que grills, to my friend's sod farm display. That's right, if you're going to build a house, you're probably going to need sod. They've got it at the expo. One item that caught my attention was a beautiful stainless steel refrigerator. This fridg featured a built in TV! I'm not making this stuff up. Can you imagine telling the kids, "supper will be ready in a few minutes. Why don't you go watch the fridg ...

Here's a consumer report on a cool little refrigerator, the skybox:

The SkyBox Rookie Fridge is a compact refrigerator with three cool new features that set it apart from any other fridge you can find. It inherited the backlit front panel from its big brother, the SkyBox vendor, so you can customize it with logos from your favorite sports teams. We’ve currently got more than 225 kits in process, including some new categories beyond sports that we’ll be announcing soon.

The Rookie Fridge also has four castor wheels that ...