Should I Repair or Replace My Refrigerator? Ask One Thing

Repair it if the failed part sits outside the sealed refrigeration system — fans, defrost parts, relays, control boards, gaskets, ice makers. Reported totals for those run roughly $70 to $750 against $600–$2,300 for a new fridge, so the math almost never favors replacing. If the fault is inside the sealed system — compressor, evaporator, condenser, dryer, connecting tubing — reported totals jump to $600–$1,400 and the decision turns on age.

But before you accept any sealed-system quote, check the warranty. That is the one refrigerator repair the factory may still be paying for, and it is easy to find that out only after paying a local shop.

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Start here: which side of the machine failed?

 SYMPTOM
    │
    ├─ Not cooling, but you can hear it running and feel warm air
    │  at the back grille
    │     │
    │     ├─ Freezer cold, fridge section warm ─────► OUTSIDE
    │     │   evaporator fan · damper · defrost system      $100–$400
    │     │
    │     ├─ Thick frost on the freezer back wall ────────► OUTSIDE
    │     │   defrost heater, thermostat or timer          $100–$400
    │     │
    │     └─ Both compartments slowly warming,
    │         condenser coils visibly dirty ──────────────► OUTSIDE
    │         condenser fan motor, or just a coil clean    $70–$350
    │
    ├─ Not cooling and completely silent — no compressor hum
    │     │
    │     ├─ Clicking every few minutes ─────────────────► OUTSIDE
    │     │   start relay or overload                         ~$190
    │     │
    │     └─ No click, no hum, lights work ──────► LIKELY INSIDE
    │         compressor or a sealed-system leak       $600–$1,400
    │
    ├─ Runs constantly and never reaches temperature,
    │   condenser coils already checked and clean ───► LIKELY INSIDE
    │     low refrigerant charge / restriction         $400–$1,100
    │
    ├─ Water on the floor, ice buildup in the drawer,
    │   noisy fan, no ice ────────────────────────────────► OUTSIDE
    │     drain, gasket, fan motor, ice maker            $75–$400
    │
    └─ Display shows a fault code ──► look the code up before spending
                                      anything → refrigerator error codes

Cost brackets are reported ranges from published 2026 repair cost guides, not quotes. Each bracket is the lowest floor and the highest ceiling the two guides publish for the parts that row names — so a row is as wide as the guides disagree, and no wider. Where a named fault is priced by neither guide the bracket does not stretch to cover it: the air damper, the defrost timer and clearing a blocked drain appear in no cost table on either page, and the start relay bracket is the one figure here that is built rather than reported — the part’s catalog price plus a published minimum labor fee, as the part-and-labor table further down this page sets out.

The two top brackets sit at a floor of $100 because that is where Angi starts its defrost heater and fan motor rows, under HomeGuide’s $120 and $200; on the thermostat the two guides agree on the floor and split on the ceiling. The $75 floor on the bottom branch is Angi’s door gasket, under HomeGuide’s $100. The $70 coil-clean floor is HomeGuide’s, and Angi prices that job lower still at $60–$120 — but lists it as an add-on to another visit rather than as a job worth a truck roll of its own, which is a different thing from a cheaper repair.

Two ceilings are worth knowing before you read the tree as a cap. Replacing an ice maker rather than repairing one is $250–$600 on HomeGuide against the $100–$225 repair that sets the bottom branch, so that branch can run past $400 on the ice route alone; and the two inside-branch rows are deliberately different numbers, because HomeGuide prices them as different jobs — a whole sealed system at $600–$1,400 and a refrigerant leak at $400–$1,100, against the $700–$1,250 it charges for a compressor. Costs verified August 2026; both cost guides re-read at source September 8, 2026.

Three rules make this tree worth more than the symptom lists it looks like:

A fault code beats a symptom. If the panel is showing something, decode it first — a code narrows the differential far better than “it’s not cold.” We break codes down by brand in refrigerator error codes by brand.

“Not cooling” is the symptom that spans both sides of the tree. A failed defrost heater and a failed compressor both present as a fridge that isn’t getting cold. The reported cost gap between them is roughly $100–$400 against $700–$1,250 — so the single most valuable thing a diagnostic visit buys you is knowing which one you have, before anyone quotes a repair.

“Runs constantly” carries no diagnostic weight by itself, which is why that branch is gated. GE Appliances publishes that refrigerator and freezer compressors are “designed to run 80% to 90% of the time”, and that if you are in a heat wave or an extremely hot, humid area “the run time may approach 100%.” A machine that never shuts off is doing what it was built to do. All the signal in that branch sits on never reaches temperature — and the first thing GE names for that presentation is the cheapest thing on this whole tree: “If your Refrigerator runs but is not cold enough, you may need to clean the condenser coils.” Dirty coils and a failing sealed system look identical from the kitchen and are priced roughly $70–$350 against $600–$1,400, so the coils get ruled out before the branch is entered, not after.

The caveat that cuts the other way: the same GE page says “Most refrigerator models manufactured since 2001 have a NeverClean™ Condenser that does not require cleaning” — NeverClean is GE’s own brand, so read that as a statement about GE’s line rather than about every machine, and note what it means for the check. On a fridge with a sealed condenser there is nothing to clean, so finding the coils clean rules nothing out and costs you only the time to look.

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Why the two sides are priced so differently

Everything on the outside branch is a swap. A fan motor, a relay, a defrost thermostat, a control board — screws, a connector, done, and no refrigerant is touched.

Opening the sealed system is different work under different rules. Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 608 rules, technicians who “maintain, service, repair, or dispose of equipment that could release ozone depleting refrigerants” have to be certified; small appliances fall under Type I certification. The job means recovering the existing charge with recovery equipment, cutting and brazing lines, pulling a vacuum, and recharging to spec. HomeGuide puts a compressor replacement at 3 to 8 hours.

That has a second consequence people discover the hard way: fewer shops will do it. Sealed-system work needs certification and equipment that a general appliance tech may not carry, so plenty of independents decline it and refer the job on — which is part of why sealed-system quotes come back both higher and slower.

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Where the money in a fridge repair actually goes

Every cost guide publishes totals. Almost none of them split the total, and the split is what tells you whether a quote is fair. Of the three cited below, exactly one publishes a labor line — HomeGuide’s compressor page, which breaks $700–$1,250 into a $200–$400 part and $500–$850 of labor. That it does so on the most expensive failure and nowhere else is the pattern: the split gets published where the labor is impossible to hide.

Failure	Part alone (reported)	Installed total (reported)	What you’re actually paying for
Start relay †	$45.30 catalog	~$190	Almost entirely the visit — $145 of the $190
Thermostat	—	$100–$250	Mostly the visit
Defrost heater	—	$120–$400	Mostly the visit
Evaporator fan motor	$30–$150	$250–$400	Visit + labor, ~$220–$250 of it
Control board	$100–$300	$400–$750	Visit + labor, ~$300–$450 of it
Compressor	$200–$400 typical	$700–$1,250	Labor: $500–$850 of it

Reported figures from HomeGuide’s refrigerator repair and refrigerator compressor cost guides and Angi’s 2026 refrigerator repair data, all three read at source September 8, 2026. The rows are not blended, and it matters which guide each came from. The compressor, control board, evaporator fan motor and defrost heater totals are HomeGuide’s; the thermostat is Angi’s, and the two disagree there — HomeGuide publishes $100–$400 for a thermostat against Angi’s $100–$250, so treat the top of that row as open. The larger disagreement is on the compressor, the number this whole page turns on, and it is not a disagreement about price so much as about what is being bought.

HomeGuide’s $700–$1,250 is explicitly the cost to replace a compressor. Angi lists the compressor under a column headed Repair Type at $300–$800, and its prose says “compressor repairs.” The two bands overlap on $100 of a combined $950 span. Read the gap as the tell rather than as noise: a compressor quote near $400 is almost certainly not a replacement, and the question to ask is whether anyone is opening the sealed system at all.

† The start relay is the one failure neither guide prices: no relay appears anywhere in either document. Its part price is the LG 6749C-0014E catalog listing used in the early-warning table, and its total is that part plus the same published $145 minimum labor fee used there — arithmetic, not a reported range. The floor of the outside-branch span at the top of this page is HomeGuide’s stated $70 minimum for a fridge repair; Angi’s low end is $75, and Central Minnesota’s Twin Cities figures start higher still, at $220 after a $149 diagnostic.

The two HomeGuide pages also disagree on what a new fridge costs — $600–$2,300 on the compressor page against $675–$2,500 on the repair page, and Angi is higher than both at $1,000–$3,000. This post and its calculator use the $600–$2,300 figure throughout, which is the most conservative of the three: a lower replacement price makes repair look worse, not better, everywhere the 50% rule is applied on this page.

Two things fall out of that table, and neither is obvious from the totals alone.

On every non-sealed-system repair, most of what you pay is the truck, not the part. And a fridge is the appliance where that is most true. GE Appliances’ own pricing tool returns a $114.95 trip charge in 23 of the 32 US ZIP codes where it quotes at all, rising to $153.95 in Manhattan — the full 46-ZIP table is here. On top of that, refrigerators are billed higher than anything else in the kitchen: Central Minnesota Appliance Repair publishes $149 for a refrigerator diagnostic against $129 for a standard appliance, and Yale Appliance’s published averages for January–August 2025 put refrigeration labor at $255.40 — the highest of its five categories, and $94 above ventilation at the bottom. So a $300 bill for a $60 evaporator fan motor is not someone taking advantage of you — it is what a visit costs. The practical move: if the fridge has two niggles — a torn gasket, an ice maker that stopped, a noisy fan — get them both on the same quote. The marginal cost of the second fault is small because the expensive part of the visit has already been paid for.

The compressor row is the only one where a second quote is likely to move the number, because it is the only one where labor dominates. Everywhere else you would be shopping for a cheaper truck roll, and there isn’t much room in it.

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Check the warranty before you accept the quote

This is the step most repair-or-replace advice skips, and on a sealed-system failure it is worth more than the entire rest of this page.

Refrigerators are unusual among appliances: the sealed system usually carries its own extended warranty, separate from and much longer than the one-year warranty on everything else.

Brand	Whole unit	Sealed system	Compressor beyond that
LG	1 year, parts and labor (internal/functional parts only)	5 years, parts and labor — condenser, dryer, connecting tube, evaporator	Linear/Inverter only: parts only, years 6–10. LG’s document states plainly: “Consumer will be charged for labor.”
Samsung	1 year, parts and labor — 2 years on 17 models bought Oct 1, 2022 – Sep 30, 2023 (see below)	5 years, parts and labor — compressor, evaporator, condenser, drier, connecting tubing	Digital Inverter: 10 years parts, 5 years labor
Whirlpool	1 year full warranty, parts and repair labor	Years 2–5 on sealed refrigeration system parts — compressor, evaporator, condenser, dryer, connecting tubing	—
GE	1 year, parts and labor	5 years on the sealed refrigerating system on Café and Profile lines; base GE lines are 1 year	—

LG terms read directly from LG’s published US refrigerator limited warranty. Samsung terms from Samsung’s refrigerator warranty page. Whirlpool terms as published in Whirlpool’s refrigerator warranty document — whether labor is included in years 2–5 varies between document revisions, so confirm against the sheet that came with your model. GE’s five-year sealed-system term applies to specific lines and is the one figure here taken from secondary reporting rather than read off the warranty document; verify against your own paperwork. Verified August 2026.

One Samsung cohort gets a second year of cover on the whole machine, and the warranty document buries it in a cross-reference. Samsung’s term list opens “One (1) Year Parts and Labor on Refrigerator; please see addendum for Two (2) year warranty extension” — and the addendum, four pages later, is a 2-Year Extended Limited Warranty giving “2 years parts and labor” on refrigerators purchased between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023, on an enumerated list of 17 models (three RB12A bottom-freezer, ten RF23A French-door, four RZ11T column units). If you bought a Bespoke in that window, the whole-unit column above understates your cover by a year — check your model number against the addendum before paying for a year-two repair. No other brand here publishes an equivalent.

Read the sealed-system column as a parts list, not as a term. The two brands do not cover the same set. Samsung’s five-year line names the compressor inside it; LG’s four items do not, which is exactly why LG needs a separate years 6–10 compressor line and Samsung’s ten-year line only adds the part. And both lists include the drier and connecting tubing — the parts a refrigerant leak consumes, as opposed to a compressor failure. That matters because a leak is the sealed-system fault the machine is most likely to report: LG’s code set gives refrigerant leaks two codes and the compressor none at all. If your quote says “leak,” the covered-parts question is about tubing and a drier, not about a compressor.

Now put that next to the cost table above, because the two together produce the actual advice.

The compressor part is the smaller half of a compressor job — roughly $200–$400 inside a $700–$1,250 total, with $500–$850 of it labor. So a parts-only warranty is worth about a third of the bill, not the bill. Read that third as a floor rather than as the figure, because this site prices the parts and the published split does not survive it: two of the four compressors listed in what a refrigerator compressor replacement costs sit above the top of that $200–$400 band on their own — Whirlpool’s at $410.95 and LG’s dearest at $461.40 — and against HomeGuide’s own $1,250 top the LG part is 37% of the bill rather than 32%.

On an eight-year-old LG, years 6–10 coverage turns a $950 job into something closer to $600. Better, but not free, and rarely enough on its own to flip a marginal decision. And worth nothing at all unless you were the one who bought the machine: every term in the table above is written to the first buyer and to nobody else. LG’s document is “valid only to the original retail purchaser of the product”; Samsung’s Bespoke refrigerator warranty puts the same condition in its title, “LIMITED WARRANTY TO ORIGINAL CONSUMER PURCHASER WITH PROOF OF PURCHASE”. A fridge that came with the house is out of warranty at year one whatever its serial number says.

A four-year-old fridge is a completely different situation — but on two of the four brands above, not on all four, and the table says so a few lines up. On an LG or a Samsung the five-year sealed-system term is parts and labor, so a leak or a compressor failure at year four should cost you close to nothing. On a Whirlpool the years 2–5 line covers sealed-system parts; the $500–$850 of labor broken out above is the half still in play, and the footnote’s warning about document revisions is exactly the line to check on your own sheet. On a base GE line the sealed system is out of warranty after year one — only the Café and Profile lines carry the five-year term, and that split is the one figure in the table read from secondary reporting rather than off a warranty document.

The correct first call is still the manufacturer rather than a local shop on all four, but on two of them the question you are asking is what the warranty pays, not whether the repair is free. Be careful how you read the “unauthorized repairs” line, because it is the most misquoted phrase in this whole subject. In LG’s refrigerator warranty those two words sit inside the service-trip list: the document says the warranty does not cover trips to “deliver, pick up or install, educate how to operate, correct wiring, or correct unauthorized repairs.” That is LG declining to drive out and undo somebody else’s work — not LG canceling your coverage.

The clauses that can genuinely cost you coverage are scoped to cause, not to who you called: LG excludes “damage or failure of the product resulting from misuse, abuse, improper installation, repair or maintenance” and “damage or failure of the product caused by the use of parts, components, accessories … or services that are not authorized by LG.” Call the manufacturer first on a four-year-old sealed-system fault — not because an independent voids anything, but because on an LG or a Samsung the manufacturer’s fix is free and the independent’s is not, and on a Whirlpool or a base GE the manufacturer is the only party who can tell you which half of the bill the warranty is going to absorb.

If you own an LG and don’t know your purchase date, find the receipt before you call anyone — the document, not the date. LG requires “proof of original retail purchase specifying the product model and date of purchase”, and absent it the warranty start date becomes ninety days after manufacture. That is almost always earlier than the sale, so the paperwork is not a formality: losing it shortens every term on the machine by however long it sat between the factory and your kitchen.

In Quebec, the table above is not the whole warranty on a refrigerator bought new from October 5, 2026. The province’s Consumer Protection Act adds a statutory warranty of good working order of six years from delivery on a refrigerator or freezer, parts and labor, on the whole machine rather than the sealed system alone, owed by the merchant or the manufacturer (ss. 38.1–38.6; Décret 1459-2025, s. 79.21). Two things in this section change under it. A compressor that fails in the sixth year is covered labor included, where LG’s own document starts charging for labor. And the first-buyer rule above stops deciding the outcome, because the statutory warranty passes to a later owner (s. 38.6): a Quebec refrigerator bought secondhand keeps whatever is left of its six years.

LG owners: there was also a settlement

Consumer Reports reported that LG settled a class action over refrigerators that stopped cooling, with a final approval hearing on December 15, 2020 in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. It covered 31 French-door and side-by-side models manufactured between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2017 — around 1.6 million units — and gave class members a five-year warranty extension from the original purchase date plus payments ranging from $50 to over $3,500 depending on documentation.

Both halves of it are now shut, and the second one closes by arithmetic rather than by a date anyone announced. Claims ended January 11, 2021. The warranty extension ran five years from the date of purchase — so for it still to be running today, a class refrigerator would have to have been bought new after September 2021, nearly four years after the last of them was built. There is no route left from this settlement to money or to a free repair. Refrigerators built from 2018 on are the subject of two later class actions, neither with a settlement or a claim process as of September 11, 2026, and Canada’s separate settlement closed to claims on October 25, 2024 — the compressor cost page has the dockets and the Canadian terms. What survives is diagnostic, not financial: if your LG is from that era and has stopped cooling, the model list tells you the failure has a documented history rather than being bad luck, which is worth knowing before you pay for a compressor. Reported terms of the extension differ between secondary sources, so treat LG’s own model lookup and your warranty sheet as the only authoritative versions.

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Then run the numbers

Once you know which side of the tree you’re on and what the warranty covers, the remaining question is arithmetic: does the repair buy more years than it costs per year?

InterNACHI’s life expectancy chart puts a refrigerator at 9 to 13 years, and publishes it as a guideline — in InterNACHI’s own words, not something to be “relied upon as guarantees or warranties.” Read as a countdown it does real damage: a calculator that treats “rated life minus age” as remaining life will tell you an eleven-year-old fridge is worthless, when eleven is the exact midpoint of the published band. Remaining years is an input you can edit here, not an assumption buried in the code.

For a full component-level breakdown of the expensive side, see what a refrigerator compressor replacement costs.

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What you would be replacing it with

Three things are true of the machine you would buy instead, and each one narrows the gap.

1. The fridge you’d replace it with is the least reliable kind. Yale Appliance, which sizes its dataset at 33,190 service calls, reports a first-year service rate — units serviced in year one divided by units sold — and says flatly that French door refrigerators “are trouble across the board,” attributing it to the design of moving ice through a warm compartment. Even the strongest performer in counter-depth French-door came in at 10.1%. Worth the caveat that Yale is one retailer covering Massachusetts, Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire, so it reflects what they sell and service rather than the national market — but it is one of the very few public data sets built from actual service calls instead of surveys. Yale also defines that 33,190 two ways — first-year calls on its brand page, calls tracked last year on the page above — and reconciles them nowhere; the full caveat is on the washer reliability page.

2. The energy argument is much weaker than it’s usually quoted. ENERGY STAR states a certified refrigerator is about 9% more efficient than the federal minimum standard and saves about $150 over the product’s 12-year lifetime — roughly $12 a year. The much larger “$95 a year” figure you’ll see quoted applies specifically to refrigerators over 15 years old. If yours is eight, energy savings are not going to pay for a replacement, and a page that implies otherwise is quoting the 15-year number at a 15-year problem you don’t have.

3. “Buy new and you’re covered” is a one-year claim. Every brand in the table above covers the whole appliance for one year, then narrows — to the sealed system on LG, Samsung and Whirlpool, and on the base GE lines to nothing at all. A shop repair typically carries 90 days to a year on parts and labor. That is closer to parity than it sounds.

There is one asymmetry that runs the other way, and it is worth knowing before you decide, because it expires the moment the machine dies. A refrigerator or freezer that is still plugged in and cooling is the only household appliance a utility will pay you to take away on its own — roughly $35 to $100 depending on the program, because what the utility is actually buying is the electricity the unit stops drawing. A working room air conditioner or dehumidifier is worth another $15 to $50, but on most programs only as a second unit collected on the same visit — six of the seven that publish a rule want a refrigerator in the same load, UGI will take two small units without one, and the way to be paid for a single dehumidifier is to drive it to a drop-off event yourself. Let the same fridge fail first and the offer disappears, and you are paying a retailer to haul it instead. How to dispose of an old appliance sets out the nine programs, the eligibility rules that trip up most pickups, and why the incentive is the least important part of the deal.

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Before you call anyone: four checks, in order

1. Get the real age — and expect a serial, not a date. The model/serial plate inside the fridge carries those two numbers; a build date has to be decoded out of the serial, and the decode differs by manufacturer. LG’s is the one this site works through: its own locator states the serial’s first digit is the year of manufacture and the next two the month, and the decade is not encoded — so a serial beginning 5 is 2005, 2015 or 2025. Two different dates matter below and they are not interchangeable. The warranty terms in step 3 run from the purchase date and are written to the original buyer, so find the receipt. LG’s flat-rate window, further down that step, runs from the manufacture date instead — the one the serial encodes.
2. Sort the symptom using the tree above, so you walk into the call knowing whether you’re likely on the $150 branch or the $900 one.
3. Check warranty status before booking. If it’s under five years old and the fault looks like the sealed system, call the manufacturer first. Booking an independent does not void it, whatever a shop or a salesperson tells you: no warrantor may condition coverage on your using its own brand-name service unless that service is “provided without charge under the terms of the warranty” (15 U.S.C. § 2302(c)), and the Federal Trade Commission states plainly that such tie-in sales provisions “aren’t allowed.” What a manufacturer may do is disclaim damage the outside work actually caused. So the reason to call the maker first is not fear of voiding anything — it is that in-warranty work is free and the independent’s invoice is not. On an LG the manufacturer is worth calling well past that: LG sells sealed-system work at a published flat rate — parts, labor and a 90-day repair warranty in one price — on machines built within the last seven years, ten on certain models, which is a channel none of the other three brands in the table above offers at any age. What each brand publishes before you book, and where the flat rate turns into a bad deal.
4. List every other fault. Torn gasket, dead ice maker, noisy fan. The visit is the expensive part; bundle them.

Then, if it’s out of warranty and past ten years with a sealed-system fault, replace it. Under seven with anything on the outside branch, repair it — and up to about $335 it is not close. Past that the tool starts hedging on its own numbers: on a six-year-old fridge a $500 job reads as a toss-up, and a control board at the $750 top of the band above reads as replace. The outside branch is the cheap branch, not a free pass. In between, run the calculator and answer the only question that really decides it: do you believe this fridge has that many years left in it?

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Next steps on a refrigerator quote

• Is it worth repairing a washing machine? — the same framework, applied to laundry
• How long do appliances actually last? — the full lifespan table
• Refrigerator compressor replacement cost — why sealed-system labor runs what it does
• Appliance repair costs by type, 2026 — three published sources compared, appliance by appliance
• Refrigerator error codes by brand — if you’re still diagnosing
• Extended warranty vs a repair fund — the break-even math
• Appliance sizes and fit: how to measure — one refrigerator can carry five different depths on its own spec sheet, and counter-depth still sticks out
• How to dispose of an old appliance — if you land on replace, the utility will pay you for a fridge that still runs and nothing for one that doesn’t
• Every repair-or-replace page on the site — the same cost-per-year test worked through on three other appliances, and the four rules of thumb it replaces

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Sources: LG US refrigerator limited warranty · FTC, Businessperson’s Guide to Federal Warranty Law · 15 U.S.C. § 2302(c) · Samsung refrigerator warranty · Whirlpool refrigerator warranty · EPA Section 608 technician certification · HomeGuide refrigerator repair cost · HomeGuide refrigerator compressor cost · Angi refrigerator repair cost 2026 · InterNACHI life expectancy chart · Yale Appliance service call data · Yale Appliance — what you should pay for a service call · Central Minnesota Appliance Repair 2026 pricing guide · GE Appliances service pricing tool · GE Appliances — normal run time for refrigerator/freezer compressors · GE Appliances — cleaning condenser coils · ENERGY STAR refrigerators · Consumer Reports on the LG compressor settlement · Quebec Consumer Protection Act · Décret 1459-2025, Gazette officielle du Québec, December 17, 2025

Costs, warranty terms and lifespans verified August 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026 — three months, not five, because two of the figures above sit on pages with no editions: GE’s pricing tool returns whatever it returns on the day it is queried, and Central Minnesota Appliance Repair publishes its $149 refrigerator diagnostic on an ordinary web page it can revise without notice.