If the new deluxe LG fridge was not designed by monkeys, then it was surely designed by folks who never had to actually live with it and use it. The problem is design, not reliability.
There are a number of areas where poor design is evident, starting with the lighting on the touch panel. There is no problem during the day, but at night there should be a photocell-controlled nightlight. There isn't. Other companies have utilized lighting for years, but not LG. Does the sun never set in Japan?
You can turn on the nightlight manually. That is, if you can find the switch in the dark. Good luck. Yet even with the nightlight on in a dark room, it's still impossible to read the button nomenclature. Why not just leave the nightlight on permanently? It's LED, so it should use minimal power.
There is another design faux pas. My fridge is a “French-door” model, so the icemaker is necessarily in the refrigerator, not freezer, door. The tiny amount of additional heat from the extra illumination when you turn on the light causes the ice in the bin to melt just enough to jam. If you leave the light on overnight, your first job in the morning will be to empty a block of stuck-together ice from the bin.
Looking further down, there are two freezer drawers. The two-drawer model costs extra, so it must be better than the one-drawer model, right? Not so fast. This is actually a capacity-decreasing option. Rather than using the same mechanism between the drawers that they use to seal the area between the refrigerator doors, the horizontal “joint” between the freezer drawers is done the old-fashioned way, by adding a horizontal bar. This bar effectively casts a shadow across the freezer space. That means that nothing stacked above that line can ride back into the freezer when the drawers slide closed.
In each of these design snafus, just a bit more thought could have resulted in a better design. Mine is a deluxe model with far-from-deluxe design.
This entry was submitted by Peter M. Blackford and edited by Rob Spiegel
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