It’s been a couple of weeks since my Sears refrigerator has been repaired. Apparently, it’s going to work for a while. I bought a gauge from Walmart that is designed to display the temperature of a remote sensor along with the temperature of the base unit. It has been reflecting the set temperatures since its installation. That’s great news. The emergency is over and it looks like we’re back to normal.

Now I have to review the situation and make sure that all the rash things that I said when the failure first happened are fair. I’m a scientific Skeptic and would like to think that I judge things fairly. In my first “There are Days” blog article I said, “Don’t Buy Sears or LG Refrigerators.” The emergency is over and I want to review what I said. Do I mean it now that the storm has passed?

Yes and no. I’ll probably buy from Sears again. After all, it was their team that came through with the replacement parts when other appliance repair shops wouldn’t consider attempting a repair once they found out that the box came from LG. However, I’m going to be quite a bit more careful and look into the original manufacturer. I found out that there are two brands of refrigerators that should be avoided. They are LG and Samsung and both for the same reason. The information I read stated that while the boxes are not more likely to fail they are troublesome to repair because of the lack of an adequate infrastructure. In my sample of one, I had 100 percent failure but I can’t know for certain what the overall failure rate actually is because…well…I have a sample of one. One would have to know the total number of LG boxes sold by Sears and the percentage of those that failed to get any meaningful statistics on the matter. Perhaps Consumer’s Union has those numbers and used them to base their high recommendation. Perhaps, but I still will not base my future purchases of durable goods based solely on their recommendations. I’ll also look past their main article to the user comments. I neglected to do that and while I realize that the user comments are part of a self-selected data set of bad experiences, I might consider a high number of poor reviews as significant enough to consider the Consumer Unions positive recommendation.

By the way, Sears sells fancy refrigerators from other manufacturers and the repairmen I’ve talked to say that they see lots of LG and Samsung boxes but very few GEs but don’t take advice from a blog…