LG LFX31935 31 Cu. Ft. French Door Refrigerator with Blast Chiller and Three-Layer Freezer, Stainle

• Super-Capacity (31 cu. ft.)
• Slim SpacePlus Ice System
• Smart Cooling Plus System

I've owned the LG LFX31935 for a little more than six months, and overall it has been great. It has a cavernous interior with very flexible storage options. It does a great job of keeping food cold/frozen, and it's very quiet. The material and workmanship is top notch, and it looks great. There are two things worth commenting on in more detail: the wine chiller and the ice maker.

WINE CHILLER

This unique feature is a big plus, and honestly a big selling point for my wife and I. We don't have a wine fridge, and it's nice to be able to chill a bottle of red before drinking it. This "blast chiller", as it's called, works well it chills a bottle of wine from room temperature to ~62F in 8 minutes. You just pop open the blast chiller door, slide the bottle in cork first and rest it in cradle, close the chiller and the fridge and then press the button on the front panel. Most of the time, the thing just starts to work the cradle gently swirls the bottle while the cold air is circulated through the chiller's chamber (it's a bit noisy while running, somewhere between a dishwasher and a stand mixer). Sometimes, however, the chiller refuses to start and affirms its obstinance with a red light next to the start button. According to the manual, this can happen when the fridge is not down to temp, which kind of makes sense. But the behavior seems more random than that it has done this a half dozen times at least, sometimes when I'm pretty sure nobody has been in the fridge for hours. In fact, it seems to happen whenever have guests over and are trying to show off our #$%*&@ wine chiller! Otherwise, though it's a very slick feature and one we use all the time (though it would NOT be a good idea to use on a bottle that should otherwise be decanted due to sediment).

ICE MAKER

The ice maker on this unit is completely contained in the left-hand door. This leaves the main compartment wide open and unobstructed by the ice maker, which is great. The ice maker itself if rather small, as is the bin it's capacity is probably less than half that of my old side-by-side Kenmore 25 cu ft with the ice maker in the freezer. But the real problem is the dispenser. When you push a glass against the dispenser plate, an electric motor lowers a trap door in the dispenser chute and then the dispenser mechanism starts pushing ice down the chute. It works great until one of two inevitable things happen: ice cubes jam up in the chute (the jam can be freed by poking a finger up the ice chute effective, but somehow feels wrong), or ice delivery stops because the ice in the bin is frozen together (which requires opening the left door of the fridge, opening the ice maker door, and breaking up the frozen ice mass in the bin or discarding it altogether). This is not an occasional problem, it happens almost always the first time it is used in the day.

I've had the factory-authorized service company out several times. The last time, they replaced the entire ice maker assembly (and the control panel as well, for some reason). No joy. This problem is not going away until some aspect of the current system is redesigned: either the ice chute is not wide enough, the chute door doesn't open far enough, the ice cubes are the wrong shape, the ice doesn't stay cold enough, or maybe even a combination of several things.

In all, I'd say the positives significantly outweigh the negatives, but on a fridge that costs three times what my previous one did, I guess I expected more. I'm still hoping that LG will take an interest in the ice maker problem and provide a field upgrade, but I'm not holding my breath.