Question:
me and my wife are finally getting out of the apartment life and we bought our first house during the winter when temperatures here go well below zero, will this effect it? Obviously it won't have to run that much (or ever!) to maintain it's temperature (Meaning $ savings), but will the cold temperatures outside, rather then inside, cause any problems mechanically? During the summer we would probably move it into the basement, as the garage would be hot, and the house is cooled with central air.

Answer: we switched from a 1995 GE Profile 24.5 cubic foot side-by-side refrigerator rated at 800 kWh/year to the new Whirlpool 25.5 cubic foot side-by-side Conquest rated at 680 kWh/year. I must say that the energy star ratings do seem to closely match my measured usage (about a 15% reduction in electricity usage, but I'm not sure it was a good trade, overall. The main problem is that while the GE made plenty of ice, the new Whirlpool cannot keep up with our ice consumption. I believe the main reason for this is that we have a reverse osmosis filter in our house. The Whirlpool has a filter built in and also has a large coil of tubing to store and cool water in the refrigerator rather than a water bottle as we had in the GE. Also, the GE did not have a filter. The result is that the 8 cube tray in the Whirlpool never gets filled beyond the fifth cube. Whirlpool says that the valve timer cannot be increased much beyond 8 seconds and it is already running at 7.5 seconds. I have removed the filter, but that doesn't improve the flow rate much. One thing nice about the Whirlpool icemaker is that it is designed to waste much less freezer space than other icemakers, providing about 20% more usable freezer space in the same size refrigerator. The bottom line is that you should avoid the Whirlpool Conquest (or KitchenAid Contour) if you have a reverse osmosis filter in your house.