Justin and his wife saved up and bought a sweet, petite, shiny new Whirlpool refrigerator from Lowe’s. They were thrilled with their new purchase for about three weeks, until it began to make an unholy buzzing noise. No one can make the buzzing stop. Not Whirlpool, not Lowe’s, not an endless procession of repairmen, and not either company’s executive customer service. What now?

He writes:

I’m going to preface this by saying that I used to work for one of Whirlpool’s partner companies and wasn’t smart enough to buy my appliances while I employed there (doh).

With a baby on the way, my wife and I decided to get our remodeling stuff taken care of in our old house beforehand. We saved our pennies and piece by piece updated the kitchen, and the crown jewel was finally buying a shiny new stainless steel whirlpool side by side refrigerator (which was much more expensive because its a smaller 21.7 cu/ft model). This was our first brand new refrigerator ever, so we were pretty jacked.

I order it, takes a month to get there and the nice folks from lowes came and delivered/installed it for us. It was glorious, shiny and dead silent. Fast forward 3 weeks later and I hear sort of a clunk, then a buzzing noise from what I can only guess is the compressor. Ok, call whirlpool and they send a tech out. “It’s normal”. Well no, its not because I can actually pinpoint the day the noises started.

Call whirlpool again, they said “oh we’ll send out a different company”. By this time Lowes Executive support is involved as well. They send out a different company and per whirlpool they’ll replace the compressor. I wait for the part, they come back and replace it and now it’s about twice as loud as the first one.

I bitch again to whirlpool and lowes, gets escalated to whirlpool executive support, and they decide to go ahead and replace the compressor again. Go through the process again, this one is even louder than the second one.

On a side note, this may not seem like a huge deal to most people but this sucker runs 90% of the time, and its super annoying and able to be heard in all rooms of my house. I’ve now missed 6 days of work waiting around for repair guys, and I’ve got a sweet looking fridge that sounds like it’s on the verge of dying.

Lowes is very helpful, but its now not there problem because you only have 7 days to return an appliance (it worked great for 3 weeks). Not really sure what else I can do to get whirlpool to replace this lemon, that’s why i’m emailing you guys. halp.

If Justin has already exhausted executive customer service options, there’s not a lot more that Consumerist can do. Either an appliance repair technician with magical powers needs to be found (“Reparo compressor!“), Or Whirlpool needs to replace this brand-new, racket-making fridge. Are you listening, Whirlpool?

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