The ice maker in our old fridge died again a few weeks ago. I’ve already replaced the unit two times along with all the water lines and filters. I’ve had a professional plumbing outfit look at everything, but they couldn’t seem to find the cause of the ice-maker failures. Filling ice trays from the kitchen faucet works, but it gets old in a hurry. It was time to bite the bullet and get a new fridge.

With that thought in mind, my wife and I visited the local Best-Buy, Lowe’s, and Home-Depot stores to compare prices, features, looks, and useability. We also checked on-line via Amazon, Walmart, and Nebraska Furniture Mart and a few others. It didn’t take long for us to narrow down our preferences given our budget.

Side-by-side setups didn’t seem as user friendly as having the freezer on the bottom in a pull-out drawer did to us. We also wanted glass shelving instead of wire. We didn’t care for those with built-in displays. We already have enough screens in our kitchen.

We reasoned that the smart displays would become outdated before the analog components of the refrigerator do. The manufacturer will almost certainly stop supporting the Android OS version that runs the smart screens at some point, they all eventually do. If you leave the device connected to your internet access after OS upgrade and patching period(s), it will likely become a network security risk.

Some models we looked at had quick access doors embedded in the main door that seemed likely to cut down on power use if you kept frequently used items there. We also liked those that had water pitchers that automatically refilled in addition to a traditional water tap. Gourmet ice of various types seemed to be a common premium function, we preferred those with two separate ice makers that each made a different style and/or size.

Several manufacturers include a small multi-function drawer between the refrigerator and the and freezer. On LG and Samsung units with the extra drawer, you can choose to have it function as freezer or, a refrigerator. They were the perfect size to store drinks, quick foods, and stuff for events. After getting ours home we found that the drawer also makes a great place for staging the ingredients for your next meal in.

Our preferences for the refrigerator on-top, freezer on bottom, multi-function drawer, separate ice makers, and water pitcher features narrowed our choice to just two models. In the end we went with the Samsung because its extra drawer was deeper than an LG model with very similar features at a very similar price.

The Samsung drawer would be able to hold US soda-pop and beer cans upright. The LG didn’t look quite deep enough for that. I never confirmed that the LG couldn’t, I just eyeballed it at the store. If you have the LG with a drawer and know it holds upright cans, please feel free to say so in the comments. We also appreciated that the Samsung model we decided on had user replaceable panels that completely change the appliance’s look.

The model we ended up bringing home is a named the Samsung Bespoke 29cu. ft. 4-Door French Door Smart Refrigerator (model#: RF29BB8600QLAA). It has upper French doors that open into the fridge, a hidden pass-through door, an automatic filtered water pitcher, a filtered water tap, a freezer/fridge drawer, two icemakers, user changeable front panels, and it connects to wi-fi.

It’s this last feature, connecting to wi-fi, that I thought was going to be a useless gimmick. It turns out that I was wrong. My living-room TV is made by Samsung. Both it and the fridge are on the same network, and both are connected to the SmartThings app on my phone. This lets the fridge pop up a message on the television and my phone if someone leaves a door or the drawer open. It has already saved my bacon, literally.

We’ve had the new appliance for several months now and I still firmly believe we made the right choice for our home and lifestyle. With no handles on the front, the fridge looks modern, sleek, and clean. It is super easy to wipe down with a rag anytime it gets smudged.

It has numerous modern features that are all upgrades from the previous ten-year-old unit. The upper fridge space is much easier to keep organized and clean than our side-by-side was. Loading groceries is easier on my back now that the coke goes in a waist height drawer.

The stainless-steel panels we opted for are a little more fragile than I would like. They seem to dent and scratch very easily. Nothing too major has happened to ours yet, but we’re considering ordering the glass replacements at some point down the road.

The ice is fantastic. Each maker is mounted under the drawer, but above the freezer. There’s a catch bin that is divided in two with one side below each maker when the drawer is shut. The entire ice bin is covered by a sliding plastic lid. There is no built-in ice crusher. It does come with an ice scoop that fits in a slot on the lid.

The left ice maker produces regular size “traditional” ice cubes, similar to those from most plastic ice trays and older built-in freezer units. The right maker produces smaller ice nuggets. They are not as small as Sonic, or McDonald’s ice, about half the of the left’s size. Using my area’s local water (known to be hard) passing through the fridge’s double filtration system, the ice is pretty clear and super hard. The production rate of both sides easily keeps up with the four of us even in a mid-western summer heat wave.

It turns out that scooping ice out of a drawer is quite a bit quicker and much quieter than filling a vessel from an auger mechanism in the front door was. The tradeoff is that having ice in the drawer is more physically demanding than pushing your glass against a lever and waiting. The process of bending, opening the drawer, sliding open the ice bin’s lid, scooping, closing the ice bin’s lid, putting the scoop back, and closing the freezer-drawer has not been a problem for those in my household.

In my opinion, when viewed in terms of quality-of-life upgrades that you can afford to splurge on, the drawer is worth the three-hundred-dollars extra that units with the feature cost. It isn’t completely necessary for a refrigerator to do its job, but we sure use ours a lot.

We set ours to “fridge-mode” and load it with pop-cans, lunch meats, stuff we’re preparing to grill, cheeses, and other frequently used items like lettuce and sliced vegetables or fruits. It slides open and closed quickly, quietly, and easily. The pull grasp is at “waist-height” for average standing adults. We’ve never flipped it to the colder “freezer” temperatures, other than to test it once, but we like having the flexibility to do so if needed.

The pass-through door and the small shelves behind it are great to store things like ketchup, mustard, mayo, sauces, etc., but they are too small for larger items like milk containers. All three of the doors are opened by pulling on hand-sized recesses which are located in the top and bottom edges. The two drawers have recesses in their top edges to pull open from as well.

One shelf on the right-hand side of the main refrigerator collapses. This makes it perfect for taller items like two-liter bottles and one-gallon jugs to sit on the bottom shelf. This low profile makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for when you open either one, or both of the main doors. We’ve never extended ours other than to test it once, but we like having the flexibility to do so if needed.

We ended up purchasing ours at the local Best Buy store because it was the best price for the model we wanted at the time. At the time of this writing, they still have the best price I could find for model number RF29BB8600QLAA at this link. The new design and technology upgrades are great. The price is high, considering that my old one cost less than $1000.00.