Compact Freezer Refrigerator with Lock - Stainless Steel
CUSTOMER REVIEW
The EdgeStar has much to boast of: it is lightweight, easy to carry and move, roomy, attractive, and versatile as both a refrigerator and (marginally) as a freezer. Setup is simple, and the price is excellent. Strongly tainting this appliance however, is a thermostat dial which is either incompetently designed, incompetently calibrated, or both
Before continuing, let's not fail to note the advertised description for this product: "Just turn the thermostat to select the appropriate temperature for your application!"
Falling with equal snugness on the Things That Make You Go Duh list is the instruction manual telling us that "The knob has markings to indicate the relative temperature settings, but in general, turning the knob counter-clockwise corresponds to colder temperatures."
So if we turn the dial one way, it gets colder. Turn it the other way it gets warmer. We can handle that. The markings on the dial bear witness to and confirm this elegant conception of appliance design:
regrigeration------> MIN......OFF.....MAX
freezing-----------> MIN......||......MAX
Interesting then, that in practice there is *no* temperature change in the freezer when dialed to "MIN", or dialed to "MAX". I measure both at a steady 20 degrees.
With some playing, one discovers that colder temperatures are achieved, erratically, within the petite 1.5 millimeter space between the two vertical lines separating "Min" and "Max".
Moving counter clockwise per instructions along the dial after the arrow marked "Freezer", the temperatures I normally get are, in order:
20 (when dialed to "Min")
15 (when dialed to the left vertical line)
4 or 12 degrees (when between the two vertical lines)
10 (when dialed to the right vertical line)
20 (when dialed to "Max).
Perhaps the advertised 0 degree capability is buried someplace within the 1.5 mm space between the two vertical lines, but after several days of moving the dial minutely to the left or right, I'm unable to find it.
Additionally, after reaching the coldest discernable temperature of 4 degrees once, it took me 2 days to find it again while continuing my hunt for the elusive advertised 0 degrees.
This is especially frustrating since it takes about half a day or more for a temperature change to be reached within the freezer after moving the thermostat dial -- and when you move it, you don't know for certain if you're making it colder or warmer.
Which is to say, this isn't a particular fast appliance: The manual recommends not introducing frozen food to the freezer until it's been turned to the coldest setting (wherever that is) for at least 2 hours after turning it on. That seems wildly optimistic to me. In practice, it takes roughly 5 hours to freeze undersized 1" ice cubes from power-up using the tray bundled with this freezer.
To its credit, the EchoStar is fine as a refrigerator, and fine as a freezer as long as you aren't picky about hitting the the normally recommended 0 degrees for frozen foods.
But sorry, it should not require several days to find the coldest temperature on a device by nudging a dial back and forth within a space of a milimeter. And oddly enough, even without the instruction booklet telling me to do so, I fully expect "Max" to be colder than "Min", and not be actually located at some microscopicly ambiguous point between the two.
"Just turn the thermostat to select the appropriate temperature for your application!"
Yeah. Duh.
