Wine Cooler - Good For Beer, Too!

Our kitchen renovation designs finally seem to have given us one insight: we're getting a wine refrigerator (which will also hold beer, never fear). We want it to look really cool, because we're shallow as hell; and we want the option of building it in as part of the kitchen.

This is Manhattan; apartments we could buy didn't exactly offer us gourmet-sized kitchens, so in the interests of maximizing storage, for now the wine refrigerator will be freestanding, a cool piece of furniture in our "library/project room," a.k.a. "the room a previous owner made by chopping the long living room into two pieces."

We've seen the whole range of Haier, Avanti, and some other bland-looking stainless models. Then, while shopping around for other kitchen appliances, what do we see but this Franklin Chef (Everstar HDC36SS in Home Depot - they label the model differently with the Despot) double-door, dual-temperature, compact wine refrigerator. We fell in love, hard, for this little guy, and thought not twice about the relatively hefty price tag compared to single-door and single-zone models.

(Later we learned of others selling this model cheaper, but we were already hooked.)

Specs

So the unit is standard cabinet depth (23 1/2") and height (33 1/2"), as you might expect: it's built to be slid into a cabinet configuration, or left standalone. It's also 23 1/2" wide, standardized as well with cabinet and appliance configurations. All the refrigeration coils and whatnot are "hidden" inside the refrigerator's shell, unlike normal refrigerators. This helps it run much quieter than kitchen fridges, and, well, it looks better, too.

Most of the unit is black metal. However, the doors, which take up the entire front, are stainless steel, with large clear-glass windows in each. For a unit incorporated into a kitchen, it will match up as perfectly as one might expect with other stainless-steel appliances. Standalone, it looks like a nice black wine cooler with stainless doors.

The dual zones can be set between 46 degrees and 64 degrees Fahrenheit (8-18 degrees Celsius, but the displays are Fahrenheit-only). Setting up is painfully easy: put the unit where you want it, wait 24 hours before plugging the unit in, then plug it in. There's no on-off switch; power equals on.

Once the unit comes to the preset 55 degrees on each side, the nice man on the phone (I'll get to that) recommended dropping the temperature a few degrees at a time if you want one side colder than 55. For warmer, just set the new temperature and eventually it'll get there.

Setting temperature, you say? Just press the down or up arrows to get to the temperature desired, and press "SET". No special button sequences to recall. The display will light up in blue, and stay on for two minutes after the last button pressed.

You can turn on the cooler lights independently as well, as each door has its own "LIGHT ON/OFF" button. The white light fills its compartment with light, for laziness reasons I gather. I suppose if you tend to grab bottles of wine in the dark, or you're trying to show off your favorite wines a little bit, this is helpful.

Me Likee Design

The dual-door setup was exactly what appealed to us. It's very satisfying to be able to set different temperatures on each side, and the doors -- individually lockable -- are clear-glass paned inside their stainless frame. They seal well, and there's been no issue with condensation on the inside. If your house is humid, however, be prepared for a bit of water on the outside of the door.

Each side of the unit unsurprisingly holds eighteen standard-size wine bottles. If you store a lot of champagne-bottle shaped wines, fewer are going to fit, or you'll have to alternate direction between bottles. There are indents on each chrome-plated wire shelf to hold the bottles steady, of course, and a full cooler means snugly-fitted bottles, corks all pointing outward.

A neat feature, which probably didn't help save on overall capacity: the bottom row is tilted at a 45-degree angle such that the three wines stored there on each side are visible as "showcase" wines. This design also keeps the rack clear of the drip trays below each compressor, so it might have been wasted space otherwise (or the company would have had to re-engineer the drip tray area).

It's a neat snobby feature that I hope to one day be able to populate with truly great wines; or I'll just keep my really cool 750ml beer bottles there for a while longer, I suppose. Or I'll stack a bunch of twelve-ounce beer bottles on the bottom of the unit. Options, options, options.

See, and Hear, How It Runs

All the buttons beep when you hit them. It's not annoying at all. Really. No, I'm serious. Stop laughing.

Once we set the cooler up, and adjusted the front feet (the back feet do not adjust) to compensate for the non-flat nature of our floor, we plugged it in. Almost immediately the compressor started up, and we left the temperature settings at 55 degrees each to let the unit come down from ambient. I had already removed the tape holding the shelves in place for shipping.

Initially, we thought nothing of the noise. The compressor couldn't possibly be "whisper-quiet," right? Aside: actually, "whisper-quiet" in the literal sense is pretty loud; this unit doesn't approach that. Still, the compressor does add to the background noise, and in an otherwise quiet apartment, it's evident that we own a second refrigeration unit. It turns on with an audible click, and clicks off when it's finished.

When the compressor is not running and both fans are off, there's virtually no sound, no indication that the unit is even working. When one or both fans are going, the unit has a faint electric-type hum. A full-size refrigerator's noise output dwarfs this unit's, but if you're looking to find a wine cooler that is completely quiet, this ain't the one.

We decided we could live with that noise level because there's no vibration to accompany it. However, we noticed that the sides, and the top, of the unit became fairly warm when the compressor ran. Fairly warm to the point where sometimes it got uncomfortable to leave my hand on top of the cooler. It cooled down quickly when the compressor was finished; but those first few days, the compressor ran a lot.

And Then, the Issues

One may ask why the compressor ran so much those first few days. One has a valid question. The compressor ran so much because the unit periodically stopped maintaining temperature. Sure, we'd check it out, set the temperatures to 55 and 46, and check back every so often to see the temps going down. Turn our backs for a few hours, et voila, we're at 67 and 56 for no apparent reason. Hm. It seemed that the unit was resetting itself overnight or during the day, and I'm not saying the power to that outlet wasn't wonky, but that would have been a clean answer to the issue.

Then the weekend came, and the unit decided the alarm system needed testing. Sitting in the living room, we heard a steady beeping coming from the cooler. The temperature gauges read reasonable temperatures, but the "HIGH TEMP" warning was flashing. There's no way to control the beeping, either, except to wait about a minute for it to stop (the alarm continued to flash). The temperature gauges were accurate, as my handy kitchen thermometer confirmed.

The unit did this twice that day. We unplugged the cooler for 15 minutes to "let it rest." Logically, this should not have helped, but I like to think it had a better chance than percussive maintenance. When I plugged it back in, the unit appeared to have shaken off the effects of whatever drugs it was on, and has not had issues in the month since.

Customer Service

Calling customer service was painless. I spoke to a very nice gentleman within a couple minutes of navigating the automated tree, and after listening patiently to my story, he was willing to require the Home Depot to come out and retrieve the unit and replace it in kind, as, well, it's not easy to drag a wine cooler onto the subway or into a taxi.

We gave the unit a few more days' opportunity to screw up, but it failed to do so. It continues to occupy the same space in the apartment, contentedly maintaining a constant temperature for the beer and wine inside.

A Little More on the Dual Naming Convention

Franklin Chef renames and repackages the FWC36 wine cooler for Home Depot. I compared the manuals for the two models - Everstar HDC36SS and Franklin Chef FWC36 - and found the manuals, save the model numbers and helpline number, to be identical, down to the drawings and the font. Not a word out of place. Even the secondary language pages were identical.

I suppose the company does this to offload a great deal of their customer service and repair needs. Franklin Chef-badged coolers are serviced by Franklin Chef, but Home Depot is (at least initially) responsible for Everstar-badged cooler repairs and returns; buying a Franklin Chef-badged unit means a qualified repair call, or shipping it back to Franklin Chef -- neither option being particularly cost-effective. Home Depot, well, most people can just drive the unit back to the store and exchange it, and since the bulk of their sales and therefore service calls originate at Home Depot with this agreement, Franklin Chef saves a bundle on the repair costs and can sell it a bit cheaper through them.

Final Thoughts

If you're looking for an economical method of storing a modest wine collection, this is not the unit for you. If you buy your wine by the case, this is not the unit for you.

However, if you want something under-counter that will add to the value of your home, now you're talking. And if you want a pleasant-looking piece of functional standalone furniture, this could fill the bill as well.

Because of the initial headache, I can't really give this model a high rating. If we erased that first week, then this could easily have been a four-star, even five-star unit to me. But since their service was so good, and they are willing to fix whatever goes wrong, I can chalk up these issues to a random problem, not a chronic issue, and still recommend the product. The style here does not totally outstrip the function, and to get both, the Franklin Chef / Everstar Wine Cooler performs quite well.