LEC L5026 Larder Fridge (Lec L5026)

Member Name: stephbond89

Product:	Lec L5026
Date:	06/08/09 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good quality, relatively cheap, plenty big enough for a couple of a small family.

Disadvantages: The technicians aren't much good and take too long to come out!

We got this fridge in June as a birthday present for my husband...strange I know, but it was needed very veryyyyy badly after moving from a furnished to unfurnished kitchen, and having no fridge or freezer was getting difficult...!!!

The fridge we got was what they call "graded", meaning that the appliance somewhere on it has some minor cosmetic "injury" which means it cannot be sold full price by LEC (or any other manufacturer), this is normally a scratch, or a dint, and never affects the workings of the appliance, but you know what it's like, everything has to be perfect, and instead of just throwing the slightly damaged appliances, they knock £50 off and sell them as graded, when I heard this I was thinking oh jeez, it's going to have a massive scratch in the door, it's going to look hideous, I'm going to want to hide it away. But when it came, the only minor thing we could see, was a tiny dint in the side, about the size of a 5p piece and about 1mm deep, looking like something had knocked against it slightly...and it had a good £50-£100 knocked off the price for this...!!!

Anyway onto the fridge itself: we plugged him in and left him there for 24 hours before putting anything in on a medium setting of around 3-4, everything seemed fine and we popped our food and drinks in. The next morning I came down to find a bottle of beer which had been in there had exploded everywhere, all over the place in the fridge, and everything was frozen, I cursed myself and turned the fridge down to its lowest setting of 1, thinking that it was very strange to have to do this as normally they were set at a medium temperature.

Again the next day the same thing, everything in the fridge was frozen rock solid, it was like it had been in the freezer not fridge, we even had a chicken breast in there which was frozen right through! We knew something was obviously wrong, and phoned the place it had been bought from.

They said to phone LEC themselves who would arrange for a technician to come out and fix it, and we read that on LEC fridges the thermostat broke quite easily. This was nothing to do with been graded, it just happened on some fridges. So we phoned LEC who said they'd phone us in a weeks time with a repair slot. A WEEK!!! We had no fridge for, even though we had long life milk, it still went off because of been frozen and then defrosted so much, we ended up just leaving the fridge off and empty.

So a week later and we had a phone call to say the man would be coming the next day between 3 and 7pm. A man from a company called Dr Refridgeration came to our house, looked at the fridge and said it was the thermostat, and that he'd have one sent out to us, and we had to phone him when it arrived and he'd come to fit it. We weren't very impressed really, we had told him what the problem was on the phone, you'd think he would have brought the thermostat with him...but no.

So another week ensued with no fridge, when the thermostat had arrived a couple of days after the man had gone, we tried phoning a good 5 times, with no answer, so in the end we phoned the company themselves, who said the guy had gone on holiday, and they didn't know why he'd told us to phone him! So three days later he came back and fitted the thermostat, and now it works fine.

The fridge itself is small enough to fit under your worktop, and has three selves and a salad drawer in the main part of the fridge, and in the door there are three compartments, two for bottles/jars and one for eggs.

Now it's been fixed, it just needs to be put on a medium temperature and it makes everything nice and cool, and fresh!

The total volume of the fridge is 100litres, and you can change the way the door opens to either the left or to the right. We manage to fit everything we need into our fridge, there are two of us, and to be honest we don't have lots of things for our fridge, mainly cheese, milk, butter, sandwich meat, veg and drinks. But there is always plenty of room left over so it would be fine for a family of 4.

The normal price for one of these is around the £150 mark, but as I said you can get graded appliances which are alot cheaper and perfect for those on a tight budget, or who are buying fot the first time.

The fridge suits our needs perfectly, and is great for what it's used for! You can rearrange the shelves so that you have bigger or smaller space, and there are 6 temperature settings.

For the price this LEC is a great little fridge, just beware if you need to get a technician out to it, they do take along time!!!!

Summary: A great little fridge if nothing goes wrong with it!!!

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