The most reliable refrigerator you can buy is an "apartment" refrigerator. The freezer is on top and the fridge is on the bottom.

This is a by the numbers how many failures how many years until failure collection of data.

If you get your freezer on the bottom the rate of failure goes up, the failure rate goes higher if it's a side by side freezer fridge.

If the it has an ice machine and water dispenser the rate goes up.

If it has a clock on it the rate goes up.

Until a few years ago you could still buy a fridge that didn't have a computer but I think that is finally a thing of the past. Computerized refrigerators fail more often than non-computerized.

I will only ever buy an apartment refrigerator.

6.3 cu ft refrigerator, 1947$ = $127; 2022$ = $1,687.31

2022 Magic Chef 7.3 cu. ft refrigerator: $274.99

There are two subjects to account for here: (1) value engineering (2) survivor bias. "Value engineering" means the Magic Chef was designed to a price point. Thanks very much to computers and computing, engineering has gotten radically more precise since 1947. Think about this: VCRs don't work without micron tolerances in the read heads and VCRs are so primitive and old that you're all contemplating the last time you saw one. That on-sale-for-$127 refrigerator was a value in 1947, but it was also five times as expensive as the 2022 value. It used more electricity, weighed more, and had maintenance planned in its life cycle.

Which is where "survivor bias" comes in. Not every 1947 GE refrigerator survived. They didn't all keep working. Nearly all of them succumbed to time, or cost too much to maintain, or had the seals go and there were no parts, etc. The ones that are left? We look at and marvel. We do that with everything, from trees to cars to grandparents. Some of 'em are gonna keep on truckin'. That's what a normal distribution says - some are gonna die early, some are going to live forever.

And the better your value engineering, the fewer outliers.

Look. You can buy the shit out of a $1600 fridge. You can also go old-school. here's a 5.5 cu ft. Miele. It's $1800, is absolutely tiny, and is nearly 100% feature-free. It's also built in a privately-held factory in Germany renowned for its working conditions, attention to detail and dedication to craft. I mean yeah Samsung will sell you one with the Internet on it but again - value engineering. Nobody in 1947 thought they needed a camera inside talking to a monitor outside to tell them what's in the goddamn fridge but here we are. Meanwhile if you want truck-like appliances they're readily available.

Fuckin' old farts have been saying "they just don't build 'em like they used to" for as long as there's been old farts. But look - the first plasma I ever spec'd was a 50" pioneer 720p that came in at a whopping $20,000. Right now? Amazon will get me a 50" 4k by tomorrow morning for $250.00. If I wanted to spend $20k that gets me like four 90" 8k monstrosities. That 1947 GE? kinda sucks for GE that it's still running if you ask them. Singer did that; they built their sewing machines way, way, way too well to the point where they instituted the tradition of "trade-in" so they could buy back their old shit and scrap it. This is why you still see "original" Singer sewing machines but you see exactly zero Gen II Singer sewing machines. They learned.

A couple years ago a local gentleman brought his 1947 GE fridge to me for rewiring and re-gasketing.

Haha everything but the compressor and condenser

That job went well and he has been using that fridge ever since as a beverage fridge.

Which means he fills it full of beer and over the course of several days it cools things down to cellar temperature. Yeah - if you put a giant heat mass inside an ancient fridge and don't expect it to get too cold, it will still sort of work. But let's not pretend it's good as new.

I am saying that this compressor, and its application, show clear engineering choices made, which sacrificed its life span in the name of some modicum of energy savings.

It’s very possible that some modicum of energy savings is worth more to the customer that the cost of a new refrigerator.

Your Old Fridge Might Be Costing You A Lot More Than You Think

I once watched an interview with Paul Reed Smith where he posited that vintage per se is a red herring in musical instrument sound (though the same principles apply to all manufactured products). As an example, he used The Wind Cries Mary to point out that the best sound (in his opinion) ever captured on tape was completely produced by and recorded with equipment that was less than 12 moths old. His point was that nobody penny pinched in those days so that you could buy an off-the-shelf guitar that was basically what today would be considered a custom shop job.

The analogy to the change in the music industry breaks down a little here, because in addition to just point of sale price pressure, you also have the efficiency standards you need to meet in the appliance business. But maybe the solution to that is that you need to take in total life cycle emissions when evaluating the efficiency of a product. Because I guarantee that a 1947-built product of any efficiency beats the shit out of a 2009-built product at any efficiency. That's one of the points that's completely and totally lost in the transition-as-quickly-as-possible-to-EVs debate: a used pickup from 1985 that gets 15 mgp is probably more efficient than any freshly produced EV from a life-cycle POV. And yet we don't incentivize anyone to keep getting their cars fixed. How about $1000/yr tax credit for every year you don't buy a car after the car is 7 years old?