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Choosing The Right Refrigerator For Your Kitchen

For most homeowners with families, the refrigerator is one of the most essential parts of the kitchen. It certainly gets the most traffic as it is constantly running and being open and closed several times per day.  In many kitchens, people will hang pictures of their family, children, friends and pets.  No other appliance invites people to stand before it browsing its contents even if they were just viewed moments ago. When it comes to picking out such an important appliance, it is important to understand the refrigeration needs you have and the differences between available refrigerators.

The first thing you will need to consider when you look to purchase a refrigerator is the size of it. As a general rule of thumb, you need eight to ten cubic feet of fresh food storage for two adults. For every extra member of your family, you should add another cubic foot on to this total. It is really important to get exactly the right size refrigerator to suit your lifestyle.  You also need to make sure that your kitchen has enough space in the area to have the refrigerator. If you get a refrigerator that is bigger than you really need, you will have a lot of empty space inside and that leads to much higher electric bills, because your refrigerator has to work so much harder to cool the food.  Not to mention, you will have to compensate for having less space in your kitchen or the problem of your refrigerator not fitting into your kitchen altogether.  This problem arises when you fail to measure your dimensions properly.  In order to have your fridge work at maximum capacity, it needs to have the right amount of space.

When it comes to choosing the style of your refrigerator, there are three basic choices, bottom mount, top mount, and side by side. A bottom mount refrigerator has the freezer compartment on the bottom and the refrigerator on the top, which has been seen as a more contemporary style. The theory behind this design is that you spend more time in the refrigerated compartment of your refrigerator than you do in the freezer. If you have the refrigerator on top, it will cause you to bend down less.  A top mount fridge is the traditional style that has the freezer sitting on top. This is the design that is most common. A side by side refrigerator has a freezer and refrigerated section that are adjacent to each other. They often seem to offer much less storage space upon first glance, but their capacity can be the same as a top or bottom mount model.

Refrigerators typically come with several extra features that can turn a simple appliance that chills our food into a complex machine, depending on what you need.  Before you look to purchase, it is highly recommended to figure out which features are necessary and which are simply nice to have.  Some refrigerators have adjustable shelves. How much you need your shelves to adjust depends on how often you store odd sizes of food.  If you store typical types of food that are generally the same size, then you probably do not need adjustable shelves.  You also should think about whether you want spill proof solid trays that don’t leak onto lower shelves when something is spilled or the traditional wire grill type shelves.  Spilled food and drink causes stains and can also cause odors so you also need to take this into consideration.

Another feature that varies from model to model is the icemaker. Some refrigerators have a device that allows you to get ice or even cold water from a nozzle on the door.  If you do not have this device, then you will have to make ice manually with ice trays. Getting your ice cubes from the door saves energy, because you don’t have to open the freezer every time you want ice. It is important to remember that icemakers take up freezer space, so if you can’t afford to lose that, you might want to consider a model that doesn’t have one depending on your lifestyle needs.

The most important thing to consider is how the door opens. Most, but not all, refrigerators have removable handles, so that the door can be positioned to open to the left or to the right. Make sure the model you are looking at has this feature or if it doesn’t, make sure the door opens in the direction you need it to.