Product Warning: GE Profile Refrigerator

It is widely understood that products built today, even major appliances, are largely considered "throwaway items". This means that they are purchased with the idea being that when they go out it is easier to replace them than to repair them. This is partly due to the fact that manufacturers do NOT build these products to last like they did in years past. It used to be that a refrigerator was something that lasted for decades without fail and could even be passed from one generation to another. Today the average lifespan of a modernly produced appliance is 8 years. This means that when you go out and spend thousands of dollars on your new fridge that you can expect to either replace it or be forced to perform expensive service repairs on it in less than a decade.

Now, I don't know about the rest of you but I don't like the idea of spending thousands of dollars every few years to replace major appliances. It's one thing to replace a car that you drive daily and endures tons of physical abuse from road conditions, being exposed to the elements, and generally having far more moving parts than my standard appliances at home that could wear out. But my fridge just sits there. It has 3 jobs: 1) keep my food in the fridge part cold, 2) keep my food in the freezer part frozen, and 3) produce ice. That's it. I don't ask it to accelerate rapidly so I can merge into a crowded highway at night in a thunderstorm. I don't ask it to keep my brakes from locking up when someone cuts me off. I don't ask it to perform a million calculations a second for anti-crash avoidance, lane detection & correction, all while managing a multi-valved combustion engine. I just want it to keep my food at the appropriate temperatures and freeze some water into a cubes.

I don't see why I should have to shell out thousands of dollars every few years for that! Why can't the manufacturers just make shit that works for the cost they're charging instead?

But on to my warning. I digress.

Five years, July 1, 2019, my wife and I moved into a new home. Our new home came with a new fridge, a rather basic GE side-by-side. It was nothing fancy but it worked and it wasn't worth haggling with the seller over wanting a bigger or better fridge. It was new, had been installed just a few months earlier and still included a warranty (12 months worth). We liked the house so we dealt with the underwhelming fridge.

Fast forward 31 months to February 2022. We've been in the house just over 2.5 years and we woke up one morning to find the "new" GE fridge that came with our house was dead. We troubleshot it. We called people. We Googled things. The bottom line we discovered was that the fridge was dead, the part we needed was out of stock, it would take 4-6 weeks to get the part in, and it would cost us between $1500-$2000 for the part and its installation since the unit was no longer under warranty.

We opted instead to take the money that would be spent to repair a fridge that we didn't really care for and put it towards the purchase of a new one that we liked. After a few hours of shopping around online and checking out models at our local Home Depot, we settled on a new GE Profile French Door style fridge (like this one). Sure, the price was a considerable bit more than the cost of repairing the current one but given that we didn't particularly care for the one already in the house, we opted to spend the extra to get one we liked.

In the past, GE had been known as a reliable brand. However, we were not aware at the time that we made the purchase that GE had recently been sold to a Chinese company, that I'm told is essentially a government run group. And that sell of the GE brand to the Chinese company was the reason behind our lengthy repair times because the new owners had begun phasing out any manufacturing of parts outside of China and US-based repair shops did not keep parts in stock. This meant that any part needed for repairs had to be ordered from overseas which took a few weeks unless you were willing to spend a ton of money to expedite international shipping.

Regardless, we didn't know this at the time and purchased our GE Profile fridge from a local Lowes because our Home Depot only had the display/floor model in their store and refused to sell that one to us while Lowes had one in stock. We got our new fridge home, unpacked everything, pushed it into place, hooked up the water line, plugged in the power line, assembled the door handles, and all that jazz before transferring our quickly warming but still viable foods from our old fridge to our new one.

From discovery of the old fridge's death to the complete replacement of it was less than 12 hours. Problem solved, right?

WRONG!

Reading the instruction manual for our new fridge, it talked about giving the freezer time to cool down and purging the ice maker, all standard stuff for a new unit. So we waited a few days to let things cool down and start doing what they needed to do only to find that I was constantly getting temperature warnings on my phone through the connected app and that there was no ice in the ice maker. On top of that, we kept finding strange pools of water inside our fridge. We would clean them up only to find they reappeared after a few hours.

Being that this was a new fridge, I called GE to get it serviced. I was transferred around a few times and after about an hour I was told that we lived outside of a service range and they would have to find an authorized service person that could come to my location. Someone would call me back within 48 hours to schedule the appointment.

Luckily, I didn't have to wait 48 hours before someone called but I did have to wait a week before someone could come to my house to fix whatever was causing my freezer not to freeze, my ice maker not to make ice, and whatever was leaking water into my fridge.

The first came made his first visit to our house. He spent a few hours going through everything. He eventually took the cover off the ice maker and found that the water line that ran from the water pump to the ice maker was NEVER CONNECTED. It came from the factory with no water line connected to the water pump. This meant that each time it tried to make ice that the water pump would just squirt water freely into the door compartment that housed the ice maker but not into the ice maker itself. This free flowing water then drained through the cracks in the compartment into our fridge. He fastened the water line to where it needed to go and suggested that we just make sure the freezer is closed, as if we hadn't been closing it. Then he left.

A couple of days go by. I still have no ice. My freezer is still not freezing. I call GE again and spend several minutes on the phone to be told the same thing as before, I live outside their service area and someone will call me back to schedule an appointment. I get a call the next day and they schedule the same tech to come back out the next week. He comes back and looks at everything and suggests the seal on the freezer door is just not sealing properly. He tells me how to manage it like it needed to be broke in or something and leaves. This time he's here less than 2 hours, maybe even less than 1.

Days pass and there's no improvement. I call GE for a third time and after going through the same rigamarole as before, I ask for them to send a different tech. I've lost faith in the other one. They agree and schedule someone else to come out in a week's time. I can't get anybody sooner than 5-7 days each time I call it seems.

The second guy comes out to service our new fridge for the 3rd time in less than 90 days since its purchase. He gets there and almost immediately identifies a faulty spring in the freezer door that was keeping the door from closing properly. The spring was meant to assist in auto-closing the door but was instead pushing against the soft-close mechanism causing the door to remain slightly ajar, even if we pushed it fully closed.

He was in and out in less than an hour for sure. And a few days later things were working as expected. But this meant that our brand new GE fridge that we just bought brand new still in the box from the manufacturer from a GE dealer had not 1 but 2 manufacturing defects that took multiple repair visits from multiple certified GE repair technicians to find and resolve.

We were not off to a good start with this fridge.

No skip ahead 2 years to July 2024 and our freezer on this bad boy has gone out. Which also means that the ice maker isn't working since it is dependent on the freezer. And not long after we discovered the freezer issue, it has started making a noise like a bearing in a fan is going out with intermittent buzzing sounds. We still live outside a service area so I can't schedule a service appointment through GE's app on my phone, through their website, or through their standard support phone number. Instead, I have to be transferred to another group where no matter what time of day I call I get a message that I have at least a 30 minute wait to talk to someone, who I know will tell me that they'll have to find someone and call me back within 48 hours.

GE's support system is terrible. I spent 2 hours going around in circles trying to use the systems they put in place only to get nowhere. I used the app to try to schedule service only for it to tell me that I couldn't do it through the app and needed to call the support. Then I'd call the support number only for it to tell me that my phone number didn't match to my address and that I needed to use the website. I'd go to the website and it would show the correct address for my house in contrast to the phone system telling me a different address. With the correct address on the website, I'd try to schedule service only for the website to tell me I couldn't do it there and needed to call the phone number that told me the bad address and that it couldn't schedule the appointment before directing me to the website that was now directing back to the phone number. It was an endless cycle.

That was until I pressed 0 on the phone like a mad man to get in queue to talk to a live person. After a 35 minute wait, that person spent 15 minutes asking me questions about my fridge, my address, purchase dates, etc.only to tell me that she couldn't schedule my appointment and that I would need to be transferred to another group. I asked for the direct phone number for that group and she politely provided it before transferring me. Once there, I was told it was a 48 minute wait to speak to someone.

I couldn't do it. I had already spent 2 hours chasing my tail and I was not about to spend another hour waiting for someone to tell me they would have to call me back.

I've tried to call that number again since that day once my patience returned but each time I do the wait times are excessive and I just hang up. Its endlessly infuriating to have spent so much money on something like this to have had so many issues so soon after purchasing it AND having to deal with such crappy support services and systems. I'll just call a random repairman out to fix it. I'd rather give him money to throw it in the trash than give GE more money for this garbage.

If it wasn't for the extreme cost, I'd replace it right away but I gave GE too much money to not make this thing earn its value.