Having a small refrigerator in your dorm room makes it easy to keep fresh food and cool drinks on hand between classes or when you just can’t bring yourself to eat another meal in the dining hall. Mini fridges are also great for use at home when you might need a bit of extra cold storage for groceries like meat, drinks, and vegetables. I chose a variety of price points, designs, and sizes of mini fridges to suit almost every budget and purpose. I even chose a mini fridge model with a Sabbath Mode for Jewish customers who observe strict rules about using electronics on the Sabbath and religious holidays. Keep your daily essentials properly chilled with this Whirlpool 3.1cu ft Mini Refrigerator.
First we fill the fridge with water ballast, because (fridges operate better when there’s less empty space). The Galanz GLR31TBEER features a 1950s classic car aesthetic and comes in a variety of different colors. This mini fridge offers the most storage area out of all the models we tested, measuring a whopping 3 cubic feet—about 0.5 cubic Arctic King feet larger than the rest of the pack. A mini fridge is a dorm bedroom must, the perfect addition to your home coffee bar and a great tool for storing beauty products in the bathroom. And keeping a mini fridge at your desk is always a great idea if you have food allergies or someone keeps on stealing your lunch from the office fridge.
This might make it a good choice if you’re big on frozen foods or use a lot of ice cubes. If you expect to store perishables like leftovers or milk, add a thermometer inside to monitor the temperature and ensure it stays below 38°F. It’s a good idea to buy a refrigerator thermometer and check the temperatures periodically. To keep foods safe, the fresh food compartment should be no higher than 40 degrees F and 37 degrees F is optimal.
To help you find the perfect mini fridge for your budget and needs, I put together a list of the five best models you can buy. I’ve broken down their features and price points so you can compare Arctic King and choose the one that is the best fit for your home, office, or dorm. Mini fridges are almost synonymous with college dorm life, but they can be helpful around your home or office as well.
When shopping for mini fridges, the most important features to consider are shelf configurations (and adjustability), design aesthetics, and whether or not you want a freezer. Mini fridges aren’t generally built to last the way that full-sized ones are, so keep in mind that a good one will need to be replaced around the five-year mark, depending on how much you use it. Learn more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches home products. Just like full-size fridges, we tested mini fridges in laboratory conditions and used them normally over the course of a week. This combination of approaches gives us a great sense for how these appliances behave, both in terms of raw performance and overall user friendliness. A product must have both of these qualities in order to earn our recommendation.
Keep frozen items ice cold with controls that allow you to adjust the temperature level in the freezer compartment. Most manufacturers measure the interior of a fridge by essentially flooding it with water and accounting for every empty inch inside the fridge. They would suggest you could store items in the area between the shelves and the door bins, or floating up against the ceiling. We tested mini fridges the same way we test full-size fridges—just scaled down to size. The Costway EP22672BK offers an average amount of storage space, but with a slightly smaller fridge and a slightly larger freezer.