Frigidaire vs GE refrigerators: an incident-report comparison

What this Frigidaire vs GE comparison is based on#

Of the brand pairs in this series, this is the one where the two corpora are nearly the same size. CPSC SaferProducts holds 273 incident reports filed against Frigidaire refrigerators between 2011 and 2026 and 265 filed against GE refrigerators across the same years — close enough that a difference in shares is also, near enough, a difference in the number of reports behind them. Both totals count submissions to a federal database, not units sold or units in service.

Where the two corpora agree#

They agree on what leads. The ice maker heads both lists, named in 28% of the Frigidaire reports and 24% of the GE ones, and it is the only component either corpus puts in double figures apart from the Frigidaire compressor. On a refrigerator page that is the expected shape; what is unusual here is that the two brands' leaders are so close, 4 percentage points apart with almost identical denominators.

Where they part#

Below the ice maker the two lists stop resembling each other. The Frigidaire corpus has a second cluster the GE corpus does not: the compressor at 10%, the wiring or power cord at 5% and the water valve or line at 4%. The GE corpus flattens instead — after the ice maker, nothing exceeds 2%, and the control board, the compressor and the wiring or power cord all sit at that level.

The compressor is the widest gap on the page at 8 percentage points, and the water valve or line is the cleanest one: 4% of the Frigidaire reports against 0% of the GE reports, which is 11 reports against a single one. Read that as a difference between two report profiles, not as a durability claim — the corpus counts what people wrote up, and a component that fails quietly generates fewer reports than one that fails loudly, regardless of which brand it sits in.

Frigidaire vs GE refrigerators: what the reports mention#

Both columns are shares of their own corpus, and the corpora differ in size. Frigidaire: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Frigidaire refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=273. GE: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for GE refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=265. A difference no larger than one report on either side is marked "within one-report noise".

About the corpus: these are CPSC SaferProducts reports — incidents someone chose to report, not units sold — so the shares on this page are shares of the reports and never a failure rate. The corpus is weighted toward safety events: 12,007 of its 20,581 records (58%) are fire, smoke, burn or melt reports, which over-represents the components that burn and under-represents the ones that merely stop working.

Frigidaire refrigerators: the reported component split#

Frigidaire refrigerators — every share in this table is a share of: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Frigidaire refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=273.

Shares of reports, not failure rates — see the corpus note above.

GE refrigerators: the reported component split#

GE refrigerators — every share in this table is a share of: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for GE refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=265.

Shares of reports, not failure rates — see the corpus note above.

How to use these numbers#

What this comparison can settle: which components the reported incidents of each brand actually concentrate on, for this appliance. What it cannot settle: which brand fails more often. That would need units sold, and no public source states it. Use the component split to plan for the repair each brand is most reported for, not to rank the two.