Why You Can Trust CNET Frigidaire FPBC2277RF review: Frigidaire's high-end fridge lands squarely in the middle
The Frigidaire Professional FPBC2277RF has a built-in look in exchange for less usable space. For $3,500, it doesn't offer enough features or performance.
Frigidaire's Professional line of high-end appliances comes imbued with promises of the style and substance you can find in gourmet kitchens. Specifically, the Frigidaire Pro site touts "more power, greater precision, and heavy-duty design." After spending a good deal of time with the Frigidaire Professional FPBC2277RF, the promises of professionalism from the line feel more aspirational than fully realized, at least on this particular model. For one, the performance isn't that precise. The doors missed the set temperature of the fridge by several degrees, and even the middle and top shelf of the main compartment spent lots of hours on the warm side.
Frigidaire FPBC2277RF
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The performance isn't bad, but if we're holding this Frigidaire to a professional level of quality, it doesn't measure up to the similarly priced LG LMXS30776S . This Frigidaire is counter depth, and that LG model isn't. But for the most part, we've found counter-depth machines to be variations of standard fridges, rather than entirely new models. I also find the high-end fridges in counter depth and standard depth from both LG and Samsung to be more stylish. To be fair, this Frigidaire model is a fine fridge, but the $3,500 cost puts it at the upper end of the consumer spectrum, where fine just doesn't cut it.
Explore the depths of the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF Counter-Depth Refrigerator (pictures)
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The pieces of a Professional
The Frigidaire Professional FPBC2277RF separates itself from low-end, $1,500 to $1,800 French door models with touch controls on an LCD panel, a stainless steel finish, counter-depth dimensions for that built-in look without the exorbitant price of a custom made fridge, an indoor dispenser with a light, and both a folding shelf and one that flips up to help you manage the space in the fridge.
The FPBC2277RF doesn't come to the high-end table empty handed. Combine all of the above with interior LEDs that gently fade up when you open the door, drawers that can be rearranged, and an extra ice bin in the freezer, and this Frigidaire Professional Fridge makes a convincing argument that it deserves a lofty price point.
At $3,500, though, it has to compete with the likes of the excellent $4,000 LG LMXS30776S. That fridge offers a Custom Chill Drawer you can set separately from the temperature of the main compartment. It has a door-in-door panel that allows quick access to the shelves. And the ice bin for the dispenser sits inside the left door, keeping the main fridge free for your groceries. LG offers counter-depth variations with the same features.
To be fair, I didn't find the door-in-door feature to be that helpful, but it helps the LG gain a level of polish that this Frigidaire Professional has trouble reaching. The LG even has a similar folding shelf that changes position just a little more smoothly.
Interior doppelganger
The Frigidaire Professional has trouble outdoing it's own, cheaper Frigidaire Gallery counterpart, let alone matching the $4,000 LG heavyweight. The interior of the $2,600 Frigidaire Gallery FGHB2866PF9A we reviewed previously and this $3,500 Frigidaire Professional look almost exactly the same.
A 4-pound ice bin meant for the in-door dispenser sits in the top left corner. It's a 6-pound bin in the Gallery -- the Gallery isn't counter depth, so it can stretch farther back. The flip-up shelf sits next to that. You can adjust its position as you can with the other three shelves, but not as freely, since it's half the width of the rest to allow space for the ice bin.
It flips outward, toward the bin, allowing you to place taller items on the shelf below. You lose the space on the flipping shelf itself when it's in the up position, but since it's the smallest shelf, it's the easiest one to sacrifice.
The folding shelf has an extra set of gliders resting under it. Pull the front half away from the back to get it onto those gliders, and then push it under. Do the opposite to bring it back out. Both the flipping and folding features are simple and handy enough that even if you never rearrange the actual shelves of your fridge after you set it up, you can quickly make these adjustments to help you accommodate for unusual items or occasions.
Again, though, this is nothing new. The Frigidaire Gallery has the same pieces and features. The rest of the interior of both fridges is filled out by two fresh drawers with sliders for humidity adjustment, and a full width cool drawer. The deeper fresh drawers adjust via hooks in the back -- the same device that braces the shelves, so you move them the same way.
From the shelves to the drawers, rearranging the fridge works easily enough, and because you can move the drawers on top of each other or out of the way entirely, you can almost fully customize the interior of your fridge.
You can't move the cool drawer. Other than sitting at the bottom of the fridge where it's naturally cooler because heat rises, it doesn't offer any other features. It's just an extra place to store meats and cheeses and have them closed off from the rest of the compartment.
The doors of the fridge offer a few more spots for items and again, they're almost identical to those of the Frigidaire Gallery. The left side has two bins and a small spot about the size of a soda can at the top. The right side, unburdened by the ice dispenser, has three normal-size bins, a butter bin with a pivoting plastic lid and an air filter.
Freezer foibles
The freezer keeps the structural pieces to a minimum. A sliding drawer that holds the secondary ice bin sits above the main, deep freezer compartment. An adjustable divider runs the length of the lower basket. Squeezing its top lets you move it to one side or the other, letting you split the compartment as you see fit.
The only major difference in the interior of the Frigidaire Professional and the Frigidaire Gallery is the extra ice bin in the top left corner of the freezer. It holds 7 pounds of ice, giving you plenty when combined with the 4 in the fridge.
The ice bin in the freezer suffers from the same usability quirk as on the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A . Electrolux owns Frigidaire, so where this Frigidaire Pro deviates from its Gallery compatriot, it falls in step with high-end models from Electrolux. With the ice bin, that's not a good thing. It's easy to set it in the wrong spot, where it feels snug, less than an inch away from where it needs to be.
Oddly, it feels looser in the correct spot, but if you mistakenly put the bin too far forward, you won't get any ice, even though it looks like the arm of the ice maker is in the "on" position.
The exterior
There's nothing wrong with the fact that the Frigidaire Professional looks like another Frigidaire or an Electrolux. Plenty of manufacturers stick with the structural pieces that work for them. And both the Frigidaire Pro and the Frigidaire Gallery are easy enough to use and have pleasant interiors.
Still, the high-end Frigidaire Professional should be an upgrade over the midlevel Frigidaire Gallery. The price reflects that, but the interior of the fridge doesn't.
Moving to the exterior, the difference becomes much clearer, though I hesitate to call those differences an upgrade. Both have a smudge-proof stainless finish that does a good job of resisting fingerprints, but I actually find the rounded handles and slightly convex surface of the Frigidaire Gallery more appealing than the squared off sides and rigid metal bars of the Frigidaire Professional.
It does strike the note of a more "heavy-duty design" as promised by the Frigidaire Professional Series as a whole. I'm not a big fan, but some will find the crisper angles and neater look more to their tastes.
The controls
The display by the dispenser is simplified, and I did find that more appealing than the slightly cluttered controls above the Gallery's dispenser. The Professional keeps it to four buttons -- water, crushed, cubes and a light bulb. Select what you'd like to dispense and the button lights up blue and stays lit. Press the bulb for a dim but pleasant light to guide your glass if you're getting some water at night.
The panel can also display warning messages telling you when to replace the water or air filter, or letting you know if the fridge temp is getting too high for any reason. Most of the time, those letters stay blackened and you have to look closely to see them dimly outlined against the background. It's a neat touch, as it brings warnings you need to pay attention to front and center, but keeps them from cluttering an otherwise streamlined display most of the time.
The majority of the controls for the Frigidaire Professional have been moved to a vertical panel inside the left fridge door, similar to the layout of the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A. The Frigidaire Gallery puts them all on the dispenser. Again, I thought it took away from the exterior appearance a bit, but the Gallery does make it easier to adjust the settings without keeping the door open.
Fortunately, the Frigidaire Professional panel, like the one on the Electrolux, is responsive and intuitive so you'll be able to make any settings changes quickly. You'll find a button to turn cooling on and off -- helpful when you need to clean the fridge -- a button to control power to the ice-maker, as well as one to put the freezer in turbo mode for after you get home with a big load of groceries that need cooling.
You can control the fridge and freezer temps, and you'll see a display showing the status of your air and water filter with an option to reset each after you've made a replacement. Finally, the fridge will sound a beeping alarm should the door be left open, should the power fail, or the temperature get too high due to either of those reasons.
On the panel, you'll see a red light illuminating any of those three warnings should they happen, and you can press the button next to the warning to acknowledge the issue and silence the alarm.
Frigidaire made a trade-off for its Professional line, keeping the fridge exterior simpler by moving the controls inside the door. It's a fine solution because the panel works well and making adjustments will be suitably quick. Again, though, I prefer the balance struck by the LG LMXS30776S.
LG put all of the controls on the front of the fridge by the dispenser, but it did so in a way that makes it look elegant and high-tech instead of clunky, and the controls fade away when not in use to keep the exterior pleasingly simplified.
Other than the finicky ice bin in the freezer, this Frigidaire doesn't make a lot of mistakes as far as the design and features are concerned. It lacks the excitement of the best models from LG and Samsung, but it's functional and pleasant.
You can purchase the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF for $3,500 from the manufacturer's website. It's also available online from Lowe's, Abt and other retailers that sell high-end appliances. As is typical with large appliances, you can purchase this model for less than the listed price. It sells for around $3,000 at the sites above. This Frigidaire model is not available overseas.
Squeezing the space
While it's pleasing to look at, the true test of the interior of the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF came when we tried to load it full of groceries. The Frigidaire Gallery struggled on this test compared with other high-end French-door models. Since this Frigidaire Professional is a counter-depth model and has even less room to work with, I entered with low expectations.
The upgrade to a counter-depth model costs $300 over the similar Frigidaire Professional Fridge with standard depth measurements. Both the cost of the upgrade and the amount of lost space are somewhat normal, though not entirely standard. The Samsung RH29H9000SR we reviewed doesn't see any price difference between it and it's counter-depth variation. You do lose about 7 cubic feet from one to the next, which is slightly more than the 5 lost between the Frigidaire Professional variations.
Some of LG's counter-depth models are also priced the same as the standard variation, and the difference between them can be as much as a whopping 8 cubic feet. Other LG's have the same $300 jump from one to the next. Even similar Whirlpool models had that $300 difference between counter-depth and standard, showing that if you're interested in the built-in look and can make the jump to counter-depth for less than $300, you're getting a discount.
The comparisons also make Frigidaire's sacrifice of 5 cubic feet look good. This test would show just how much functional use you're trading in order to get that custom made look.
With the easy to arrange shelves making the fridge interior fully customizable, the counter-depth Frigidaire Pro actually did pretty well, given it's size. If you're creative with the space, you can fit almost anything, and the Frigidaire kept up with the Frigidaire Gallery because of that ability to customize.
On the standard configuration test, we space the shelves evenly from top to bottom, as that's how most fridges get delivered and how most people will end up leaving them. We then load the fridge with everyday groceries, including jugs of milk, bottles and boxes of soda, meats, cheeses and condiments.
When we finished loading the normal groceries, the Frigidaire Professional FPBC2277RF looked pretty full. Again, it has less space to work with than the other high end French door models we've tested -- 15.7 cubic feet in the fridge vs. 18.5 in the Frigidaire Gallery, 18.9 in the Electrolux EI28BS80KS4A, and 17.5 in the LG LMXS30776S.
After putting all of the regular foods in an ideal location -- the milk in the main compartment, the veggies in one of the drawers, and so on -- we try to fit in each of six stress test items. These items include an extra large pizza box, a roasting pan, a party tray and other items you might want in your fridge on special occasions. After trying to fit each one individually, we see how many can fit in the fridge at once.
With a normal shelving arrangement, the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF understandably felt the strain and couldn't keep up with the others. The Frigidaire Gallery struggled on this one too, though. Having the ice maker in the upper left corner makes a big difference. LG puts it in the door and used lower profile drawers to make the most of its space and win this battle.
Again, the Frigidaire Pro almost kept up with the Gallery. Each fit two items individually, but the Gallery had enough extra wiggle room to fit two simultaneously whereas the counter-depth Pro could only fit one item at a time. The lack of depth makes a difference, but not remarkably so.
And on the next test, when we could move the shelves and take advantage of the customizable space in our best effort to fit everything, the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF squeezed in more of the stress test items.
Unless we placed the pizza box at a weird, unrealistic angle, it wouldn't fit at all. The doors wouldn't shut, as the fridge just wasn't deep enough to make the pizza box work. It fit the rest of the items individually, and it tied the Gallery by fitting two items simultaneously. Once we could move the shelves, the lack of depth mattered even less.
Be prepared, if you want this counter-depth fridge, to put in a little more work to fit large items. It's doable unless the item is extremely long. The movable shelves and drawers make it possible for most items, but it requires more effort and creative thinking to squeeze large items into the space.
You're still paying more to fit less. For that reason, I'm not a fan of the counter-depth craze, but I understand that for some, the trade-off for the extra style is worth it.
It did well on the spill test. We dump an 8-ounce glass of water on the top shelf and see how far down it drips. The Frigidaire FPBC2277RF kept it contained, both on the pour and the cleanup. That's a great result.
Nevertheless, you're sacrificing usable room with this fridge. The counter-depth aspect is part of it, but the similar Gallery fridge proves that's not the entirety of the problem and making excuses for a $3,500 appliance doesn't sit so well.
Plans for precision
The performance of the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF tells a similar story to its other aspects -- it's acceptable, but not great. To test the cooling prowess of our fridges, we put thermocouples on every shelf and in every compartment of both the fridge and freezer. Then, we collect data over a 3-day period while opening the doors at regular intervals to simulate use.
During the first three day test, we set the fridge to the industry standard 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 Celsius), and set the freezer to 0 (-18 Celsius). Here are the averages of each compartment of the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF over that three day period.
The accuracy in the freezer was great, as good as we've seen. The averages in the fridge look good, too. The doors run warm, but that's normal. It's even pretty typical for the top shelf of the fridge to be over the set point by a couple of degrees. Most importantly, you want the main body and the drawers to be accurate, and they are within a degree or two.
It's a similar result to the Frigidaire Gallery, but it's distinctly better at keeping the freezer right at 0. The cool drawer lives up to its name, and the other drawers and lowest shelf maintained that accuracy over the three day period. Unfortunately, the middle shelf didn't do a great job of keeping a steady hand.
Again, the average ended up looking accurate, but that's not all we're looking for. The temperatures of fridges naturally fluctuate over time, but the best ones keep the ups and downs to a minimum. You want your food kept close to the set point for as long as possible, but you also should try to keep anything that spoils easily below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).
We use 40 degrees F as a secondary benchmark based on guidelines established by the FDA. According to the FDA, easily spoilable foods shouldn't be left over 40 degrees for more than 2 hours consecutively or 4 hours over the course of its life.
Even though the middle shelf averages under 40 degrees F, over the course of the 3-day test, it spent about 8 hours over that mark. If you leave the fridge at its default setting, you have to be very particular about where you put spoilable items as two-thirds of the fridge's main body shows warning signs.
You could easily turn down the temperature. The fridge lets you set it anywhere between 33 and 47 degrees Fahrenheit (0 and 8 Celsius). On our second 3-day test, we kept the freezer at 0 and set the fridge to that low point of 33 degrees.
The freezer kept its accuracy and this time, the entire main compartment of the fridge stayed below 40 degrees for the duration of the test. So you can accommodate for the temperature deviations in the fridge, but it falls short of the precision promised by Frigidaire's Professional Line.
The freezer puts the performance of the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF slightly above that of the Frigidaire Gallery, but only just so. This Frigidaire's lack of temperature consistency hurts its usable range. With the increased pedigree and $900 bump in price, I was expecting more.
The verdict
Nothing's particularly wrong with this Frigidaire, it just struggles to impress in the same way as others at this price point. I can understand a couple of circumstances that would make you reasonably happy with purchasing the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF. If the exterior appeals to you more than it does to me, if you're looking for counter depth and if can find it on sale, the Frigidaire FPBC2277RF would make a good buy. That's just quite a few "ifs" for what's priced as a top-of-the-line fridge.
Because as a top-of-the-line fridge, it doesn't measure up. If you're set on counter depth, the LG LMXC23746S offers the same CustomChill Drawer and the same mix of features and style we found so appealing on the LG LMXS30776S . It's only missing the door-in-door panel that we didn't find particularly helpful. At $3,900, that counter-depth LG is a better buy than the over-priced $3,500 Frigidaire Professional FPBC2277RF. Frigidaire's fridge isn't bad, but despite putting the word "Professional" right there in the name, it's not quite ready for the big leagues.