How To Buy The Right Refrigerator
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Learn how you can get a fantastic deal When buying a new refrigerator that fits your home and budget!
Alright, it's happening!
We're expecting to move into our townhouse in November/December.
It's a new build and we’ll have 3 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms. That'll be enough space for the home office and guests.
Our new place is situated about 5-7 minutes away from the interstate, so the commute time will not change by much.
It’s a big purchase, but after running the numbers we think we made the right choice.
New Refrigerator for the New Place
Of course, no place is perfect, and there is one thing missing with this house.
We’re going to have to buy a refrigerator for it.
So we started looking around for the best deal we can get.
Which Type of Fridge Should We Get ?
This was something we thought we knew until we started to look around.
I really like the French door option, but the prices tended to be too expensive.
- Top Freezer: This is the popular model that most people are familiar with.
- Bottom Freezer: Like the name implies this has the freezer on the bottom. I like this model since We cram so much into the fridge we have now at the apartment that food has fallen out and caused some minor injuries.
- Side-by-side: My biggest worry is that some frozen pizza sized items wouldn't fit in.
- French door: This has the side by side doors with the freezer compartment on the bottom.
The place we're getting has limited space for the refrigerator. The width can not be more than 33 inches.
I didn't realize what an issue that was until we start looking around and many of the refrigerators were 35 inches.
We were going to buy a friend’s (moving out of the country) fridge which still was under warranty, but it was too big to fit in the space (it's against a wall).
Looking at the different capacities advertised, we were curious to see what is recommended for a family of two.
Checking with Lowe's buying guide for refrigerators, we got an answer:
Perhaps the most important consideration when buying a refrigerator is the capacity.
Two people generally need eight to ten cubic feet of fresh food storage, and you should add an extra cubic foot for each additional person in your family. Buying a refrigerator that is the right size is important.
If you buy a refrigerator that is too big and
don't keep it filled, it wastes energy and costs more to operate.Avoid buying a refrigerator that's too small, you waste time constantly rearranging food in the refrigerator, trying to make it all fit.
Hunting for Fridges at Lowe's and Home Depot
We decided to check out the big home stores and see what they had to offer and get an idea of how much money we needed to set aside. So far, we're looking at a GE side by side refrigerator that will cost around $898.
Besides the energey efficient appliance tax credit coming up, we wanted to get something that would keep our bills lower. ENERGY STAR's web site claims-
A fridge made before 1993 could be costing you over $100 each year to operate.
Replace it with a new ENERGY STAR qualified model and cut your related energy costs in half.
That caught my attention. Since closing won't be for another month, we're looking at other stores this weekend to see if we can find a better deal.
If you have an older appliance I found a neat calculator that estimates how much money you can save with an ENERGY STAR appliance.
We're not making the purchase until we get closer towards closing and moving in.
Locking In Our Interest Rate
In
Closing should fall within the
Don’t fall into the trendy French door trap! We have one of those fridges simply because it came with the house we bought last year. UGH! The freezer is completely useless! I buy and cook in bulk during the weekends so I just have to defrost and bake for the week when I am working. We ended up buying a free-standing freezer.
The French door models we saw were much more expensive, so they were off the list. We just went to Best Buy last night to see their prices and were told they do price matching. Right now Lowe’s has the cheapest price for what we are looking for.