Kenmore is a Horrible Brand of Refrigerator!
by Pat
(St. Louis)
Horrible brand of refrigerator! We purchased our Kenmore top freezer refrigerator model 253.7924270 one brand new from Sears on Dec 17, 2007 for $750.
It died 2 & 1/2 years later on August 1st, 2010.
It all started when the ice maker quit making ice unless the temperature in my house was 65 degrees or less, then it worked fine. Eventually ice cream turned to soup, but everything else stayed frozen.
Inside the back of the freezer started icing up rapidly, needed to be defrosted just about every week as 2 to 3 inches of ice continued to form on the vents & coils inside the freezer.
After the last defrost of my frost free fridge/freezer, the whole thing quit cooling. The coldest my refrigerator would get was 60 degrees and my freezer would only get to 50 degrees. I turned the fridge off, unplugged it for a day and let it sit, plugged it back in and now it won't even run.
I called a highly recommended local repair facility, not wanting to wait for Sears to come out or to pay their prices for a service call.
The repairman said it was probably the compressor and that it would cost me $400 to $800 to fix. I ended up calling Kenmore directly, as I was told by a friend that all sealed compressors have a 5 year warranty on them. After talking to a person at Kenmore, he stated that normally their warranty was 5 years on a sealed compressor, but of course, he couldn't find any information that stated that on the model I bought.
I was then transferred to someone who could supposedly help research my warranty further...turns out the guy from Kenmore transferred me directly to the Sears repair facility. All that guy wanted to do was sell me a protection plan that wouldn't cover my current problem on my broken refrigerator.
After explaining my problem to the customer service guy again and that I think this repair should be covered by Sears, he then said he needed to transfer me to someplace else and they could help me further.
I got pretty much the same thing after being transferred...now they wanted to sell me a protection plan for my broken refrigerator. Ugh! Sooo, after getting no where with Sears or Kenmore, I'm now looking for a new refrigerator, again!
Fyi, I talked to several other appliance store salespeople and they had heard similar horror stories about Sears & Kenmore, too. My repairman suggested I buy a Whirlpool as they seem to have less problems with them.
