how long has your refrigerator lasted?

We have a SubZero at home that came with the house, it was new when the previous owners remodeled the kitchen in the early 2000’s. Not long after we moved in we were having issues with it (about ten years old then) and looked around at replacements. Since this one is built into the cabinetry the only option to replace it that would fit and look normal would be another SubZero and they are crazy expensive (think $9-15K). Yeah, NO. We ended up having the repair guy come out, he charged us $800 to replace a part and recharge the Freon, and he said these refrigerators routinely last 30 years on average. I dislike the fact that the cabinet depth and lack of shelving configurations inside severely limit what you can put in it but aside from that it has been pretty reliable. We have an extra refrigerator and two extra freezers in the garage for our family of three.

We have a French door / freezer on bottom Whirlpool at the lake cabin that I LOVE. Water and ice and crushed ice through the door, lots of space inside and you can change the shelving inside on a whim to accommodate different items that might need refrigeration. Tall bottle or a huge cake? No problem. Giant stock pot? Again, no problem. Extra large pizza box? Yup, it fits! It’s awesome.

I bought my condo 9 years ago and it is still running. It makes weird sounds every now and then and every time I wonder "will this be the end? Please no, please last until I sell this place."  Not sure how many years it was there before i bought the place.

We just replaced a 2007 Whirlpool side by side this past week.

It was still running, but we had already fixed one issue, it was starting to make odd sounds more and more often, and it was freezing things in the fridge sometimes. Our electric company will give a refund if you call them to pick up a still working fridge. So between all of that and the fact that we figured if appliances prices spiked for any reason, we might as well go ahead and replace it ahead of that, so we bought a new one.

What a fun thread!

We have a Samsung, the French doors with the freezer on bottom. It physically has an ice maker and water dispenser on front, but… well… I don’t have the patience to unfreeze the block of ice every month, so we gave up on the ice maker. The water dispenser in the door is fantastic!

It’s very likely the same age as the house so… around 15 or so.

Every so often (random times of day..) it makes one of two little noises for 5-30 minutes-ish, like someone tapping inside it.

So, it’s probably haunted and I can’t wait for it to give up the ghost.

Interesting fact, I’ve had refrigerators die in every house I’ve lived in the last 25 years. Body count- 6 fridges.

My sister still has the one we took out of my grandmas house in 1991. It’s brown. I have no idea how old it is.

We have been married 29 years and have owned 4 fridges. The first one was just a cheap whatever we could afford fridge when we moved in together. We sold it when we bought our first house. The 2nd one was an upgrade and lasted 20 years. It still worked when we got rid of it, but we had outgrown it as our kids grew up. 3rd fridge we absolutely loved, but it broke after 3 years. It was too expensive to fix, so we bought another one. It's still going strong, but it's only 2 years old.

Luxury brands (think Sub-Zero, Miele, Thermador, etc) are engineered to last 20 years and generally do. They are also designed to be repairable if something goes wrong. Viking is a luxury brand but has a higher rate of issues; they are good about repairs though.

Very basic models with few features from brands like Whirlpool and Frigidaire also tend to last a long time because they don’t have a lot of go wrong and are using old, solid tech. They also tend to be repairable (but given their low price point, sometimes a repair can be more than a replacement).

Mid-range brands have shorter life spans - 10-12 years is a good run, if you make it past the first year without problems. They compete with each other on the latest and greatest features, so have a lot of potential points of failure but aren’t engineered as well as the high end brands because they can’t do that and stay at a competitive price point. Some brands in the category are better than others - KitchenAid is pretty solid. Samsung is very unreliable and LG is not as bad, but also prone to issues. GE is marginal. Frigidaire Gallery and Electrolux (same parent company) are both pretty good. Bosch is hit and miss. Some models are excellent and some are trouble - research well.

Jenn-Air and Monogram are both good and tend to last - they sit somewhere between mid-range and luxury.

There are a million other brands and of course this is all speaking in broad strokes. That Samsung has one of the worst reliability rates doesn’t mean every Samsung is going to go bad early. And I don’t know what kind of drugs Consumer Reports is smoking that they highly recommend LG. People in the industry do not agree with that at all.

We are still using the Maytag side by side which we purchased in 1989. It still works wonderfully and have no intention of changing any time soon.

Have only recently replaced the Maytag washer we bought at the same time and that was only because we could not get a part that needed to be replaced.