Gadgetory

Dornan door compartments allow you to open the front panel of your refrigerator exposing the indoor shelves without actually opening the door itself LG and Samsung were the first to popularize the feature now ge wants into this refrigerator the gfd 2 8 GE LDS is one of GES new door in door fridges and at a retail price of $3,100 the door and door compartment is really its only feature of note you won't get an auto-fill water dispenser or an auto filling water pitcher like another ge fridges and it can't make you a cup of coffee either there's no temperature adjustable drawer no smart home integrations and not even any drawers or shelves that slide in and fold up out of the way hope you love that door indoor compartment because it's really all you're getting and here's the thing door and door is a terrible feature it's pitched as a convenience but it's purely a gimmick I mean you're still opening a door and grabbing your groceries there's no difference doesn't make a difference in performance either it's not gonna help your fridge hold the cold any better in fact almost every door indoor compartment that I've ever tested has run warm and this one as you can see is no different now GE seems aware of this because this refrigerator uses ten percent more energy than an identical GE refrigerator that doesn't have a door indoor compartment in other words ge cranked up the cooling power and still couldn't get that compartment cold enough in the meantime you're spending more on your power bill for a feature that again offers little to no practical benefit that wasn't my only performance problem with this fridge when we cranked it down to its coldest setting of 34 degrees three degrees less than the default setting the average temperatures only fell by a single degree it's some of the weakest performance I've seen from a high-end fridge at its coldest setting now whenever we run a 72 hour test of a fridge we open the doors twice a day for five minutes in order to simulate real usage with this fridge we ran the coldest setting test a second time but we replace those normal fridge door openings with door and door compartment openings to see if that would make the performance any better in the end it didn't make a difference opening the door indoor compartment allowed just as much hot air inside as when I opened the fridge itself after 72 hours average temperatures were only 0.16 degrees lower and again that's if you're using the door indoor compartment exclusive and never opening the fridge at all now design wise I do want to give GE a little bit of credit for adding in a special shelf into that door indoor compartment that rotates out of the fridge kind of like a lazy susan it's extremely sturdy thanks to that thick metal plate that it sits on and that's nice it also helps this fridge set itself apart from other door and door fridges like it still it's more of a cosmetic feature than anything else if you can't tell by now I don't recommend this fridge or really any other door indoor fridge it's just a very poor reason to spend more on a refrigerator especially a refrigerator like this one that doesn't offer anything else along with it hard to fault the team at GE for trying to keep up with LG and Samsung who continue to gobble up more and more of the market but this was probably a trend they should have avoided