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Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A review: It's tough to warm up to Electrolux's high-end fridge

The $3,100 Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A puts on a good show but has too many issues behind the curtain.

Andrew Gebhart Former senior producer
15 min read

The industrial exterior of this foreboding fridge makes its brightly lit, welcoming interior a surprise. The initial sense of intimidation melts away. On the inside, LEDs fade up gently as the doors open; the curving glass shelves pull out to form food trays and the drawers close gently on their own after you nudge them inward. The interior feels classy yet welcoming.

5.5

Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A

The Good

The Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A gets style points for self-closing drawers and glass shelves that turn into trays. It's roomy both by the numbers and in terms of practical use.

The Bad

A lot of the features look nice and make a good first impression, but end up being a pain to use. More importantly, this $3,100 fridge doesn't perform up to expectations, with inaccurate interior temps.

The Bottom Line

Despite a high-end feel, the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A runs warm and falls flat overall. Look elsewhere for a premium French-door fridge.

The roomy Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A is full of contradictions. On the one hand, it's filled with features and little design touches like those pullout shelves. On the other, those same shelves make it tougher to actually use the fridge, as changing their position is an exercise in tedium. In fact, a lot of the features packed into this machine prove cooler in concept than practice.

It's certainly an upgrade from $1,000 top freezer models in design and space, but unimpressive performance keeps this $3,100 fridge from being worth the cost. I can't recommend it, despite some likable features.

Get comfortable with the luxury-focused Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A

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Inside out: The look and feel of the fridge's many features

Electrolux certainly filled the EI28BS80KS4A with enough stuff to make it seem high-end. The inside of the left door has a touch panel called the IQ-Touch controls. The way the drawers glide the last half-inch or so toward their shut position is called Luxury-Close.

A Perfect Temp drawer offers its own temperature settings that you can adjust separately from the fridge. You scroll between the preset temps -- listed by food -- with the push of a button, or customize an exact temp for a favorite setting anywhere in the drawer's 28 to 42 degrees Fahrenheit range (about -2 to 6 Celsius).

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You can customize temps for the Perfect Temp Drawer. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

There's even a Soft Serve drawer in the upper right corner of the freezer with a slightly higher temperature than the rest of the compartment. Stick ice cream in there and it'll come out scoopable. It's a neat idea, but there aren't any separate temperature controls up there. Electrolux just put a closed-off compartment at the top of the freezer where the temperatures would be warmer anyway and called it a feature.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, or with how hard Electrolux is trying here. Electrolux didn't skimp on the extras for this premium fridge.

You can buy the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A and its many extras from the company's website. It's also available from Home Depot, Best Buy, Sears and other major appliance dealers. Right now, you can readily find it for under the list price, which is typical for large appliances. Home Depot and Sears both list it at $2,600 instead of the $3,100 MSRP.

Overseas, the price converts to roughly £2,085 and AU$4,080 in the UK and Australia respectively. I've contacted the company to find out exact pricing and any differences in the model number and will update when I hear back.

Pay a bundle for this fridge, and you'll have plenty to show off to your neighbors. That said, the bland exterior will prove a sizable barrier to stirring up fridge envy.

The exterior

A plain silver exterior. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Door handles and a small Electrolux logo at the top right corner adorn the 36-inch-wide glistening stainless-steel front, and that's it. The rest of the front of the fridge is unbroken silver. This fridge doesn't have a dispenser and the front feels a bit plain.

The cylindrical handles don't help. They run straight up and down for the fridge and side to side for the freezer, and look utilitarian. I found them reminiscent of poles you'd hold onto on a subway car and they didn't appeal to me. That said, the design has a clean and inoffensive look and some in our office found the simplicity pleasant. If you want your fridge to blend in instead of making a statement, it works.

The fridge interior

Open up the French doors, and LEDs quickly fade up to reveal an elegant interior. Two rows of glass shelves line the space above the drawers at the bottom. Gray plastic handles run the front width of each of those shelves, and you can remove the shelves by pivoting them up and free from the brackets that hold them in place at the back of the fridge.

The shelves supposedly double as serving trays, but you have to pivot them pretty high to get them out. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

You have to pivot them to a pretty steep angle. I have trouble picturing anyone actually using wide glass trays with a small gray handle on one side as a serving tray as Electrolux intended, but even if I'm wrong here and people do want to present food to guests on the shelves of their fridge, it would be tough not to mess up any arranging you've done when tilting the shelf to lift it free.

Two more drawers for fruit and veggies split a row between the Perfect Temp compartment and the glass shelves. A slider on the bottom front of each adjusts airflow for the sake of managing humidity. All three of these drawers feature those luxury-close gliders. Push it shut, and it'll gently move the last half-inch of the way for you.

The drawers include humidity sliders and Luxury-Close rails. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

As much as I enjoyed this soft-close feature, it wasn't perfect. About a half dozen times during our testing -- often enough to be a pain and not a fluke -- the slider for one of the drawers would shift out of position. The first couple of times it happened, I didn't notice until I tried closing the drawer again and it wouldn't shut.

Fixing it didn't take long. I simply needed to reach to the side of the drawer, pull the slider out and put it back into position on the rail of the drawer. Still, it was especially aggravating that this otherwise nice feature kept messing up.

The wine and beverage mat successfully keeps bottles from rolling. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

A wine and beverage mat rests on the bottom of the Perfect Temp drawer, giving you a spot for items that might otherwise roll around, though you can move the mat easily to wherever you'd like it. This little accessory is fortunately free of any hidden drawbacks, and does a good job of keeping wine bottles in place.

The doors and controls

The drawers have four spots each for special items: a narrow bin for butter and the like at the top, two wider bins for condiments, and a pivoting bin at the bottom the width of a can of soda. That spot is actually called the Tilt-Can bin.

It's neat idea that does what it's supposed to -- it holds your cans and tilts out to make them easy to reach. The edge is also high enough to stop cans from dumping over the side. I had my doubts, and tilted the bin up and down as fast as it would go, but my Coke stayed in place.

It's an oddly specific move to dedicate part of the fridge to a single item, but since that bottom bin had to be narrow to make room for the longer Perfect Temp drawer, it makes sense. Just as Electrolux turned the potential flaw of a naturally warmer spot in the freezer into a soft-serve drawer, the Tilt-Can bin shows a limitation viewed from a different angle to make it more appealing. I applaud the creativity.

As a whole, the inside of the doors are easy to use. By lifting the middle bins, you can adjust the height. Notches rest under their back corners, so they're easy enough to maneuver and get where you want.

The control panel is responsive and intuitive. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The control panel for both the fridge and freezer runs vertically along the inward-facing edge of the left door. It's responsive and intuitive, letting you set the temperatures, switch readings from Fahrenheit to Celsius and turn on vacation mode for longer compressor cycles or Sabbath mode to trim the functionality in accordance with the day.

Other controls include a button to turn cooling off if you need to leave the doors open to clean, and options for fast freeze and fast ice. Both of those put the fridge into high gear as needed.

An alarm will sound if the door is left open, if the power fails or if the fridge temp gets too warm for any reason. The bottom button of the panel acknowledges the issue and turns off the beeping.

The freezer

Of the 27 cubic feet of space, the freezer takes up 8.8 cubic feet. Electrolux kept the structural pieces dividing the space to a minimum, and I like that in a freezer. A drawer at the top and a sliding divider in the main compartment provide enough barriers to be helpful, but not get in the way if you just want room for stacking.

Plenty of room in the fridge and the freezer. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Squeeze the handle of the main divider and it slides back and forth to separate the space as you please. It's a simpler mechanic than the spring-loaded divider in the Perfect Temp drawer. You have to pull that one all the way out to get it shifted to a new spot.

The soft-serve drawer in the top right corner works as advertised -- it stays a few degrees warmer than the rest of the freezer. A sizeable ice bin sits on the left side of the upper drawer. It produces ice at a solid rate of 4 pounds a day, and is capable of holding around 12 pounds total or roughly twice as much as the comparably priced Frigidaire FGHB2866PF .

Again, though, a minor design oversight keeps the experience from feeling seamless. The ice bin needs to sit in the exact right place in order for the automatic ice maker to turn on, and it's much too easy to mistakenly put it ever-so-slightly off.

The difference between putting it in the front half of the drawer, where it feels secure and properly fitted, and the correct spot less than an inch farther back where it's looser is so small that it took me a full day of trying to get the machine to make ice with growing frustration before I realized what was wrong.

It's easy to put the ice bin in the wrong spot. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

With the ice bin in the incorrect spot, it still looks like the arm that flips the ice maker on and off is at the right angle. It's a problem that's easy to fix, but our technical editor ran into the same issue when setting up the fridge, so it's certainly a mistake that's easy to make, and one that could cause you to unknowingly lose a few hours of ice when you're preparing for a party.

On top of that, when the bin gets full, the lowered metal arm can push ice off the back when you pull out the drawer to grab some cubes. Getting to the spilled ice behind both the small drawer at the top and the main freezer bin involves removing the ice bin and a long awkward reach.

So in addition to the bland exterior, the other big issue with showing off this fridge is that the features are generally much better in theory than in practice. Your neighbors' gasps might turn to smirks when you push in your Luxury-Close drawer only to have it jerk to a stop out of position.

Practicality problems: Fun fades into frustration

To test the space, we load our fridges full of food. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A has plenty of room, but using that room to its fullest requires a lot of patience and finesse. The fridge itself is 18.9 cubic feet, which is plenty. The $4,000 LG LMXS30776S has a total of 30 cubic feet, but only 17.5 cubic feet are dedicated to the fridge. The comparable Frigidaire FGHB2866PF is around the same measurements: it has 27.2 total cubic feet with 18.5 cubic feet in the fridge, but it dedicates a portion of the real estate to hold ice for the in-door dispenser.

Yet, the smallest of the three, the LG, uses the space the best and fits the most groceries. Its folding shelves and low-profile drawers make a big difference. We know this because we don't take the given measurements of these fridges at face value. We pack them full of foodstuffs (and empty containers, and fake veggies...) until they're bursting at the seams, and then we judge just how big a fridge actually is.

We do our load tests twice per fridge. The first time, we arrange the shelves evenly from top to bottom. On the second, we move them as we see fit to make the most of the room available. Both times, we take a normal assortment of foods and fill the fridge as if we were using it on a day-to-day basis. Then, we try to fit six different stress test items in on top of that normal load.

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Our six stress test items. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The first goal for the fridge is to fit each of these items individually. Then, we see how many we can pack into the fridge at once.

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Tall items were difficult for Electrolux with a standard shelf arrangement. Ry Crist/CNET

The Electrolux faired pretty well on the first test. It fit everything besides the cake tray and pitcher and squeezed them in at the same time in addition to fitting them individually. This couldn't match the LG, which fit each item individually including the cake tray and pitcher, but it bested the Frigidaire which only squeezed in two stress test items.

The main challenge for the Electrolux with evenly spaced shelves came from tall items. With the LG, the folding shelves allowed us the extra space we needed to fit milk jugs in the main compartment. We avoid putting our milk jugs in the door whenever possible on the load tests, as doors tend to run warmer and we want to simulate ideal usage.

Unfortunately, the drawers of the Electrolux take up lots of space in the main compartment and with evenly spaced shelves, we had nowhere to put milk or other tall items. That's a big black mark on an otherwise positive result from the normal arrangement load test, but it's not necessarily damning.

If we couldn't fit milk in the main compartment at all, that would be quite bad. In Round 2, when we could arrange the shelves to optimize the space, Electrolux found redemption.

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The Electrolux fit everything once we rearranged the shelves. Ry Crist/CNET

For the Electrolux, this test might be more telling than the first. I imagine you might not change the shelving arrangement in your fridge often, but it makes sense to arrange it when you first get the fridge so as to best fit the items you buy most. Once we shifted things around to dedicate a shelf to tall items, the Electrolux fit everything.

This test was also telling because it showed just how tedious it is to change the position of the shelves. I talked earlier about the glass shelves that supposedly double as serving trays, and aside from the feature not making much sense to me, here it revealed its main drawback -- it makes repositioning shelves much more tedious than in the competition.

I've yet to test a fridge that makes rearranging the shelves easy, but with the Samsung RF34H9960S4 and the LG LMXS30776S, it's simple enough. Pivot the shelf up to release the hooks in back and pivot it back into the slots you want.

The removable trays of the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A add a couple of extra steps. First, you have to pull out the tray and find somewhere to set it. Then, you have to reach to the back and unlock the braces that hold those trays in place. Doing so involves pulling two small plastic tabs on either side of the brace.

Tabs on the back of the shelf braces keep them locked in place. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Those tabs come loose easily, and twice during our tests, they fell off the brace entirely and had to be snapped back on. Once you manage to successfully get them to the unlocked position, then you can pivot the hooks on the back of the brace as you would on Step 1 with the LG or Samsung fridges. Put the hooks in the slot you want, push the tabs to lock them back up and pivot the serving tray back into place, and finally, you're done.

It's not a quick process. Again, I don't imagine you'd want to shift the shelves in your fridge often, but this will make you even more reluctant to do so, which might prove costly if you're trying to squeeze things in for a party. That's a tough tradeoff for a feature that doesn't add much practical use.

That said, though the removable nature of the trays doesn't add much, the shape does. The curved edges are great at spill protection. We dump an 8-ounce glass of water on the top shelf of our fridges to see how far down it drips. Since the trays gently slope inward, not a drop escaped. We spilled and cleaned up and didn't have to touch any other shelf.

Curved edges led to a great result on the spill test. Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Next, I gave the pull-out nature of the shelf one last chance to win me over. If I could spill water on a shelf, and get it free to dump the water I spilled without spreading any liquid further, then I'd call the rearrangement fracas a fair trade. But because you have to pivot the trays to get them out, the removable shelves don't help with spill management either -- I tried to be extremely careful, but the water dumped over the back edge as I finessed the tray loose.

The shape of the shelves is a nice touch, but the fact that they're removeable adds little and makes it harder to make full use of the otherwise generous amount of space. The Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A is certainly roomy, but the LG LMXS30776S does more with the room it has for a similar price.

Lukewarm reception: Temperature consistency tests

How we test refrigerators (pictures)

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In our longest and most revealing test, the Electrolux didn't fare any better. We measure the temperature on every shelf and in every compartment of our fridges over a three-day period. We set the temp first to the normal default of 37 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 Celsius). Then, we set it to 33 (0.6 Celsius) degrees and measure for another three days. The freezer gets set to 0 Fahrenheit (-17.8 Celsius) for both. During the course of both tests, we regularly open the fridge and freezer doors to simulate use.

All fridges will see some degree of temperature fluctuation as the compressor cycles on and off, so the Electrolux does well to keep its waves relatively smooth.

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Electrolux keeps a consistent temperature, just an inaccurate one. Jared Hannah/CNET

The fridge held a steady hand at both set points; unfortunately, it held that hand at the wrong spot. On both tests, Electrolux struggled with accuracy. Worse, on the 37-degree test, lots of areas of the fridge averaged over 40 degrees (4.4 Celsius).

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Doors typically run warm, but it's not good that the middle shelf of the main compartment averages over 40 degrees. Jared Hannah/CNET

The FDA warns against keeping food that spoils easily over 40 degrees for extended periods of time, so we use that temperature as a secondary benchmark next to accuracy. The fact that the doors run way over 40 degrees and more than 12 degrees over the set point isn't great, but doors on plenty of fridges run warm.

More troubling is the average temp of the shelf in the middle of the fridge's main compartment. The FDA guidelines go on to say that spoilable food shouldn't be kept over 40 degrees for more than 2 hours at a time or 4 hours over the life of the food. Out of the 72 hours of the test, the area of the fridge where you're most likely to keep big items spent about 55 hours over 40 degrees.

That's not to say you need to run screaming from the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A. You can simply adjust the temperature downward. It's more a mark against the usable range. At 33 degrees, the main compartment stayed below 40 degrees.

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At 33 degrees, Electrolux still didn't find accuracy, but it got the main compartment below 40. Jared Hannah/CNET

In terms of accuracy, this still isn't a great result, but at least the main part of the compartment keeps below the ideal temperature threshold for easily spoilable foodstuffs.

Even the freezer had trouble staying near 0 degrees F. The top part in the freezer diagram is that soft-serve drawer, so it's meant to be warmer, but the rest of the freezer missed the intended mark by 4 degrees or more.

So no, the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A isn't dangerously warm. You can accommodate your temperature settings to keep your food appropriately cool, but needing to be accommodated, and chopping off a portion of the usable range in the process, is a poor showing indeed for a $3,100 fridge. If you're at all particular about what temperature you like your food kept, and you probably are if you're shopping in this price range, this is an even better reason than the frustrating features to look elsewhere.

The verdict

I have some affection for the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A. From the fact that practically all of its features are called Luxury Something -- Luxury-Close drawers, Luxury-Design shelves and lighting, the Luxury-Glide freezer -- to the way it turns limiting spaces into special areas for ice cream and soda cans, it feels like this is a machine that's trying hard to keep up with the premium fridges of the world.

Except, this isn't a discount fridge from a small company trying to make a name for itself. This is a $3,100 machine from Electrolux, a company with the pedigree to keep up with best from Samsung and LG and at a price where I'd expect no less. The Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A is packed with features, but they trip over themselves and diminish usability. On top of that, it couldn't hold an accurate temperature near the set point.

If you're looking for a luxury fridge, I recommend the $4,000 LG LMXS30776S for its superior performance and cleverly implemented features. The Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A tries to keep up, but ends up disappointing.

5.5

Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A

Score Breakdown

Features 6Design 7Performance 4Usability 6