Hisense HRBM483B

Power Efficient Black Steel Bottom Mount Refrigerator – This is a great refrigerator. It replaced our trusted Whirpool WRX52HWG6 which served us almost 20 years. It was still working great... we decided to retire it to the garage, due to its faded looks and peeling paint. This Hisense is beautiful, stylish, very spacious and does everything right. It was the largest fridge we could fit in a standard… Read more

900mm wide kitchen space. It comes with a 3-year general warranty; 11 years on the compressor. It is also very quiet in operation and 6-star energy efficient. Initially, we focused on Westinghouse and Kelvinator brands but got disappointed with bad reviews, nosy operation and short warranty period. Then we expanded our search to other brands and realised that this Hisense would fit all our needs perfectly.

The strong points are the great fridge volume area, glass shelves, very easy to use and intuitive electronic touch controls, stunning looks, and door reversible kit supplied with the fridge.

The freezer is a bottom mount, which means all our daily groceries are at our height reach. The freezer volume is good too.

The nitpicking: there is no light in the freezer compartment, the door left open alarm is missing and the glass shelves should be a few millimetres wider. All very minor issues.

The best temperatures for us are 5 deg C fridge and -20 deg C freezer compartment.

The crisper should be pushed all the way in, to engage with the vent at the back of the fridge - bottom left corner. This will prevent veggies from becoming frozen.

The fridge is fairly expensive, but worth the price.

Finally a large and energy efficient fridge – I first came across the Hisense HRBM483B fridge while reading a recent issue of Renew magazine, who described it in their product listings section. Though I note that the previous model name was used (HR6BMFF519B) which I heard was because new legislation in Australia required fridge model names to reflect usable storage volume, as opposed to… Read more

total/gross volume. This meant that Hisense had to update the model name here, though fridges with either model name are allegedly exactly the same.

The prospect of a large, yet highly energy efficient fridge immediately appealed to me, as I’d been needing to upgrade from our previous model for more storage space. The bottom mount design also appealed; the only thing that didn’t appeal was the black steel finish. I wanted a white finish, mainly because we don’t get enough natural light in our old house and it would be going in a dark room. Anything that would reflect more light would help lighten up the room. Additionally, I didn’t expect the modern look would match our old house.

After some more research, this fridge still seemed like the best option, in terms of size, price and, especially, energy efficiency, as this was the only fridge available in Australia with six stars. So despite reservations on the colour/finish, we decided to buy it.

I haggled Harvey Norman down to $1350, as they were (almost) able to price match with Stan Cash (they didn’t quite price-match with Stan Cash because Stan Cash were closed for the day, so Harvey Norman couldn’t ascertain whether Stan Cash had the model in stock or not, as the website didn’t specify). Regardless, I was very happy with this price for such a large and good quality fridge, in an environment of supply shortages. We picked it up the next day from their warehouse at the end of January, 2022.

This is the first new fridge I’ve owned, and my first Hisense product. I’ve used various other designs, brands and sizes in the past with which to compare. This fridge replaced a smaller top-mount fridge/freezer unit, and a bar freezer. We were able to fit everything from the old freezers and fridge into the new unit. We’ve now used this new fridge for three months, so we’ve had time to evaluate its performance.

Firstly on energy consumption, as I think this is the feature that really sets this fridge apart. At a yearly consumption of 251 kWh/year, it performs excellently in this regard. Though, for a reason unknown to me, the specifications for the previous model name list a consumption of 216 kWh/year (CEC), and from memory was listed at 202 kWh/year in the Renew article. After installing this fridge, our daily household electricity consumption approximately halved, from ~4 kWh/day to ~2 kWh/day. Note that we installed the fridge in a small unheated room beside the heated kitchen/living room to further improve efficiency.

What I don’t understand is why other manufacturers don’t produce similarly efficient fridges. Yet this is, at the time of writing, the only six-star fridge available in Australia. You’ll commonly find comparable sized fridges on the market that consume twice the amount of energy as this one, particularly French Door and Side-by-Side styles. The bottom mount seems to be the way to go for energy efficiency. It seems like smart design, since the upper parts of the room will typically be warmer than the lower parts of a room. I’ve measured the temperature difference between the air at the ceiling and at the floor in our house to be around 5 degrees Celsius. It therefore makes sense to have the freezer at the bottom, where less energy will be lost from the freezer according to Newton’s Law of Cooling. I suspect the cool air flowing out of the freezer when you open the door will also be more impeded when at the floor, though I guess this will be counteracted by greater cool air flow out of the fridge being placed above the freezer, and the fridge typically being opened more frequently. Though it also makes sense ergonomically to have the fridge above the freezer for greater accessibility, since it’s usually accessed more frequently.

And why don’t consumers demand or choose a more energy efficient fridge given that it is commonly the highest consuming appliance in the house? I have friends that have bought freezers and converted them to run as fridges in order to achieve similar efficiencies. So, well done Hisense for designing such an efficient fridge.

The fridge also receives another tick in environmental performance because it uses the refrigerant R600a with a relatively low Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 3 (this means that as a gas in the atmosphere it absorbs three times the amount of heat as carbon dioxide). Compare this to R12 and R134a, other commonly used refrigerants in the past, which have GWP’s of 10,200 and 1300 respectively! This is an important consideration, because, as described in the book “Drawdown”, managing refrigerants can have the single greatest impact on slowing global warming of any solution currently available.

Storage design for this fridge, in my opinion, is also good. I read some customer reviews that had complained of poor design in this fridge, with concerns such as poorly sized door bins that don’t fit standard milk bottles, or having to open the door widely to pull out the crisper drawer. However, we’ve been able to store everything in the fridge efficiently and conveniently. There’s a variety of bin storage sizes in the door to suit a bunch of different sized things, which works well for us. The shelf spacing in the main part of the fridge is also fine. The glass shelves provide a flat strong surface for placing items, and the strength is needed for such a wide fridge. They’re also easy to clean, and to see food items beneath them.

Having to open the door widely to fully open the crisper drawer is a little annoying, but I think it’s a reasonable trade-off for the half-depth bin door that the designers included. The specifications state that the door needs to open 130 degrees to open the crisper, and without having measured the angle myself, I’d say this is about right. Note though that you can open the crisper drawer perhaps a third of the way with the door only partly open (say 45 degrees).

Other reviewers have complained about the lack of a door alarm (for when you leave the door open). For me this is totally a non-issue. I’m the kind of person that would always pay enough attention to ensure I closed the fridge door properly (which is at least partly driven by my aversion to wasting energy, which leaving a fridge door open entails). In fact, I think I’d rather not have a door alarm, as there are occasions when I need to add a lot of items or reorganise things in the fridge, which would take long enough for a door alarm to sound. In my experience, a door alarm has only been an annoyance and I can’t remember one serving its purpose and alarming me to an instance when I haven’t closed the door (though housemates on the other hand is another matter).

This fridge, in fact, has an alternative feature to a door alarm, which I prefer, though I note that it’s something other reviewers have complained about. It’s that, when closing the door, it swings freely until perhaps the final 150 mm from closing, where it experiences increased resistance that, once overcome, appears to propel the door closed for the final part. It means that if you don’t overcome the resistance, the door remains about 150 mm open. Thus, it’s either closed, or conspicuously ajar, since the door isn’t in a stable position within ~150 mm of being closed.

I haven’t found much to fault this fridge with. The only gripe I’ve had is that we’ve had some food freeze below the cool air vents in both the crisper and shelves, with the temperature set at 4 degrees Celsius. We seemed to have solved the problem by setting the temperature at 5 degrees instead. I’m also mindful of putting the food that I add to the fridge below the vents to be cooled more efficiently and reduce the risk of other foods freezing.

Another feature is an energy saving mode. We’re on holiday at the moment and I’ve taken the opportunity to run the fridge on its low energy (holiday?) mode, which appears to set the temperature at 6 degrees.

Generally I don’t care much for fancy and mostly superfluous features, and happily this fridge doesn’t come with those. I guess the twist ice maker and the alternative modes (super cool or energy saving mode) are as fancy as it gets, and they’re all useful features.

Overall, this fridge has met my needs and exceeded my expectations (since I had some reservations after reading customer reviews). I’m even happy with the black steel colour (which is actually only on the doors, while the side panels are painted black). The panels are flat and quite reflective of light, and the aesthetics look pretty good to me. The large size enables us to store gluts of food that we dive (i.e. obtain excess produce that supermarkets are discarding), grow in our veggie garden or forage, and should serve us well as our family grows (there’s currently three of us). I’d certainly recommend this fridge to friends, and I hope that this fridge is a trailblazer for other brands to produce more efficient fridges too.