Yep. SJHF said it. :) Easier to see and access. Americans are also taller than they were a generation ago...(though I know there are exceptions. ;-) )

Freezer on bottom aren't anything new, but the French door craze does seem to have brought them into prominence.

Yes....but.... :)

I currently have a SxS which has the fridge (and freezer) going all the way down. The crisper drawers and stuff are down low so the bottom locations are perfectly accessible. It looks like top-freezer fridges have the same thing: drawers for the nether regions.

And of course having the freezer a drawer makes sense from an energy standpoint, but don't you spend extra time digging in there? Is it not like a big cooler you'd take camping? Obviously I've never used one. Yet generally I'm a fan of drawers.

Unfortunately I can't find a bottom-freezer fridge that isn't a French door model (in full depth, 36" wide, that is).

don't you spend extra time digging in there

Yes, a little - 10 or 15 seconds. But still, I only open the freezer 3 times a day, not 25. As for drawers at the bottom of a side by side, the fact that they're drawers doesn't change the fact that you have to bend down to access what's in them. (Nothing worse than a side by side to me - a freezer that's not wide enough, a fridge that's not wide enough, and stuff you want way down at the bottom :-) ).

If I remember right, I'm at least half a foot taller than you. :) On my old, freezer on the top Kenmore (from my higher education days), the freezer was perfectly accessible because it was at shoulder/eye level. The crisper drawers in the bottom of the fridge were a total pain, and the shelf above them, at knee level, was no picnic. The top shelf was about waist level. I had to bend to see everything. The freezer was always a mess because everything in front had to be moved to get things from the back.

I grew up with SubZero, so a bottom freezer, but not that tall. A lot of them nowadays would be really hard for stature-impared folks to get into. They're like at my waist! Much better if there are two drawers if there's that much freezer. At home, the freezer was mostly for ice, ice cream, stockcicles and lemoncicles, a few packets of veg for convenience, and for holding things to cook later in the day. The real freezers were in the garage. Smaller worked. I get the bigger freezer if that's all one has, but you shouldn't have to tumble head first inside to get at things.

Most bottom freezers, and even the lower drawers in my column-style all freezer, have dividers to make organizing easier. It's good to get moveable/removable ones, though, in case you have a lot of round tubs of ice cream, like my father, and not many Lean Cuisines. :) Even the SubZero has an interior basket, and the deeper ones certainly do, which is like a drawer within a drawer (or a ROTS, if you will). This helps keep it from being like the dreaded camping cooler. :)

I love the all fridge and all freezer, but if I had to have a single unit, I'd choose the bottom freezer every time. Just not the waist high bottom freezer. :)

As to doors, the French door style is very popular because you don't have to worry about the width of the door swing. It's also easier on the manufacturer because the hinges don't have to support as much weight of food/liquid... That's why the new big full depth, 36" wide fridges are all French door. Traditional full depth fridges are 32-33" wide. There are plenty of those with a single upper door and bottom freezer.

I don't know if SubZero was the first with a freezer drawer, but it was a vast improvement. The first SZ we had had a door on the freezer that swung on left hand hinges. There was a fixed shelf inside that held the ice catcher and small items, and underneath (full of my father's ice creams) was a basket that pivoted out to the right. The new (1985) model has the drawer freezer with the ice catcher shelf as an interior basket. Much better. :)

I do kind of remember getting to be big enough to reach the milk from the top door shelf (glass bottles put there by the milkman). Shorties don't fare as well, though the old style, grille on top SZ at least put the works up out of the way, and left the lower down for useage. I can definitely see why a lower freezer isn't for everyone. But most people...

Alright alright...I'll have to go play with them some more I guess. I've had SxSs for the last 20 years and really don't mind 'em. I still haven't replaced the one that I was supposed to replace with a new one in my LAST kitchen remodel. We had already decided on a 48" built-in SxS for the new kitchen but the location is deep enough for an old-school fatty. 36" in a counter depth or BI isn't big enough, but a full depth model is.

Agreed, side by side was junk from day one, no room. I'll take the freezer on top any day. The others are salesmanship by some young college grad who uses one to store beer and eats pizza from a box.

Unless you need the extra capacity and/or features of bottom mount/side by side, or need the fridge to be at eye level, there is no reason to avoid top mount. Top mount fridges tend to be simpler, and most have no electronics at all, or even dampers: just a single thermostat for both the freezer and fridge. Because of the simplicity this type of fridge is likely to last longer and cost less to repair if it does fail.

"Why does America no longer like top-freezers?"

There are plenty of top mounts in my area with some side by sides sprinkled in. I rarely see bottoms mounts/french doors in real life. Don't forget that the appliances most frequently talked about on Gardenweb are not representative of the appliances most Americans actually have.

I know they're out there, but in the 36" width (and full depth) they aren't. GE has one but I can't find others. (I usually use AJMadison for appliance sorting which seems to cover most brands available to me, but if I've missed any, I want to know.)

Oldfixer, you are showing a common feeling folks seem to share for SxSs, but I have never had one fail before its time. I have a feeling that the only reason my spouse might balk at getting a normal fridge instead of the SZ we have specced out (a SxS model, no less!) is that I'll be cheap and say "oh let's just keep this one for now since it fits" and we'll have the same ugly SxS fridge we've had for 3 kitchens that wasn't new when we got it.

Oldfixer speaks for him/her seif, and a "Few others".

There are many of us that love our SxS fridges, and especially ME!!!!!

Wife and I have had our JA 48" built in for 8 years now.
Has tons of room in both fridge and freezer plenty of room for pizza boxes or whatever.

We are just as apt to access the freezer (especially for ice) and having the ice at the most convenient level (for us) as well as having things that we use the most in the freezer and fridge at the most convenient level, at least at our ages just can't be beat.

This was our first SxS, we've had top mount freezers before, but never a bottom mount freezer, No way we want do go digging around in one for stuff in the bottom freezer.

I can recall the days when my folks had a chest type freezer and I would watch Mom "Diggin and Diggin" to find what she was looking for~~~~~We ain't gonna live that way!!!

So for us, it will always be a large SXS.

To us the only thing that comes "close" to the convenience of an SxS would be Separate (a la Thermador columns), but I don't want to spend the money, (which I have Tons of, by the way), to run two compressors, and another reason why I'm not an SZ fan.

So msg here, speak for yourself oldfixer! There are a lot of fans for SXS fridges, and YES, we are "Far Past the College Brat Age"!

Gary

Remember when most refrigerators had the freezer on top? Was there something wrong with that configuration? What's wrong with 'em?

Getting back to the original question: fashion. When I was a kid we had neighbors with a bottom freezer model and we all thought it was just plain weird. When I would house sit for them when they went on vacation I never saw any advantage to it.

But that's the trend now, till they manage to think of another way to configure a fridge and good marketing plan for it. And so it go like coil stoves--I'd as soon have a coil stove as a regular electric smoothop, but now coils have been reduced to the junk level only, and that's happening with top freezers now, too.

(As for the side issue, personally I've always thought a SxS the worst possible use of space.)

I think the SxS Gary's talking about is "apples and oranges". How many people have a 48" fridge? I can't imagine having one -- I have a 30" and it's plenty. So sure, a SxS that's 48" wide is wide enough, but that has nothing to do with your normal 36" fridge.

BTW, my parents had an awesome GE fridge when I was a kid - not only did it have a bottom freezer, but the shelves in the refrigerator part were rounded at the back and rotated! Terrible use of space, but really convenient :-)

Those old swingouts were so cooooool!

I currently have a 33" wide, full depth, SxS. The skinny dimensions of the fridge don't bother us. But we do want a little more fridge space. (We do have a stand-alone freezer elsewhere--otherwise the freezer would be both too skinny and too small.)

And yeah, I did go over the possibility of a full-fridge like the Whirlpool "Sidekick" paired with a SZ freezer drawer, but that's just weird.

So we had planned on something like Gary's--a 48" SxS. But have you looked inside a 36" wide, standard depth FD fridge? It's huuuuuuuge! I just have to get over the bottom freezer thing.

They're all good. Some work better for some things than others, some people have preferences for one or the other, and none are perfect (except Gary's. :P ).

My biggest problem with most of the bottom freezers now is that most of the time either the crisper is tiny or the freezer is, because the guts have to go somewhere.

In the old top freezers it never bothered me that the top shelf area was kind of slanty in the back, but I really hate a crisper that won't even hold a good sized celery bunch.

That's definitely something to keep in mind when shopping. I hate crushed veggies.

Now I'm looking at some of the 4-door models with the 4th compartment convertible. Now THAT is a neat idea, although it seems failure prone.

The first refrigerator I remember from childhood is a Philco bottom-freezer unit circa 1964. Everyone else's which wasn't that kind was strange to me.

Now here's one that 'should not be' 'failure prone'~~~~after all 'Itsa Miele',
It can be YOURS ,fori, for less than
15 GRAND~~~~~~such a deal, (or izzat 'Steal')?
And Lotsa room to store your Meal!

Click the helpful link at end of my post to see it.

Gary

Here is a link that might be useful: Honkin Miele Fridge

Our 11 year old Kenmore just died. It has the freezer on top. I want to get a bottom freezer because I am so tired of bending over or going to one knee multiple times a day to find and pull out items in the refrigerator. My better half is not convinced that a bottom freezer will reduce much work in finding things in the freezer and especially when it needs to be cleaned. she says it will be too much work as compared with a top freezer. Any thoughts?

I see this a revived older thread - did I miss any posts saying that having the freezer compartment on the bottom makes the refrigerator more energy efficient?

Hmm, looks like I might've been wrong about that - never mind...

This post was edited by carolb_w_fl on Tue, Feb 3, 15 at 10:14

We had freezer-on-top varieties over the decades and love our bottom freezer model: no more pulling out something frozen from the bottom of the heap and risking the top of the pile tumbling out (and onto your foot...ask me how I know!).

I have a freezer on top currently (I don't think any other configuration is possible when you have space for only a 28 inch fridge with limited height). When I build I want a 32 inch wide, freezer on the bottom model, not French door style. I'm tall, bum knee and sometimes my back goes bad. Far too often I find things I would have seen sooner at eye level or thereabouts, but haven't in my current set-up, until too late. They cost a bit more, but here's a place where I'll spend.

I have a single door, fridge on top, I really like it because everything is easy to see at convenient eye level. I wanted big crispers at a convenient height as I love vege's, and I wanted gallon size space in the door with clear plastic sleving so that I could see the smaller jars and so that all of the condiments had their own convenient easy to find home, not lost somewhere in back of the fridge. BUT, I live in the city with three grocery stores within (long) walking distance and don't need a big freezer for storage. I use the freezer once a day, maybe. If I lived in a more remote location I would have to have a separate freezer as the freezer on this model is fine for my purposes but would not work if I really needed to store a significant amount of frozen goods.

The freezer on top configuration holds a lot but I really resented that everything at eye level was in the freezer and therefore something that I seldom needed to see. I had to lean down and kind of under to see the shelves in the refrigerator.

For a while I had a SxS and I found that I didn't use enough of the interior space so I ended up storing enormous amounts of ice in the freezer and water in the refrigerator because otherwise every time I opened the door the refrigerator kicked on for hours. In the SxS configuration, I did not like that the crispers were at and below knee level. So I had to buy large Tupperware type containers to keep on the higher more convenient shelves. At that time all such containers were opaque so you had to pull them out and open everything or remember where I had put everything. If the manufacturers made it possible for you to have half of the SXS's refrigerator side be nothing but convenient crispers they would sell a ton more of them (so long as they did not sacrifice door space for the condiments to make that happen).