Never buy a Ge refrigerator: Update even worse then I knew

[Bill Dufour]

I posted about one year ago warning that ge fridges use a custom chipped water filter that shuts down when they think it has done enough. Aftermarket makers do not have the chip and will not work. Ge wants over $50 for a filter. I bought some from ebay but genuine factory made.
I had to replace the filter today. It could not read the chip in 3 of 4 I tried. I doubt ge will replace them with good filters. So one working filter costs about $80 -400 once a year!
Bill D.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Samsung charges about $35 per filter. It takes 2 per year. I don't know these filters have chips.

[Zachary Hoyt]

It sounds frustrating for sure. Maybe the ones on eBay were being sold because the previous buyer couldn't make them work either. I've never lived with a fridge that dispensed water, we just put it in plastic pitchers and set them inside the fridge when we want cold water. I think modern life has some conveniences that are more trouble than they're worth, but I've always had odd notions.

[John Ziebron]

If you have a reverse osmosis system you can "T" that in to your fridge and bypass the filter. Some fridges automatically bypass the filter if it's not installed and others generally make a dummy filter available. Even if you don't have an RO system now you can buy one for about $150 so your recap wouldn't take very long.

[Bill Dufour]

Less then one year old so I will have ge pay to repair it. I want to log in the failure before the warranty expires. I bet they will not want to replace it.
Bill D.

AFAIK Only ge chips their filters.

[Bill Dufour]

If you have a reverse osmosis system you can "T" that in to your fridge and bypass the filter. Some fridges automatically bypass the filter if it's not installed and others generally make a dummy filter available. Even if you don't have an RO system now you can buy one for about $150 so your recap wouldn't take very long.

You can not bypass the filter that easy. I do have a filter bypass plug that may or may not have a working chip. If that chip is bad the valves do not work, no cold water, and no ice maker either.
Bill D.

[Michael Schuch]

With that kind of robbery, I agree, I won't!

Are all new refrigerators like this?

[Ole Anderson]

I presume my 8 YO Whirlpool has a similar filter. When it comes time for a change, I just hit the reset button. It seems to go by amount filtered without regard to water quality. I buy a new filter every 3 or 4 resets.

[William Fretwell]

The Maytag we have uses a $75 filter, at least we can re-set it with a push of a button. Water minerals vary a lot, 3 months is too short! It also has an air filter to change and re-set. There is a water drain filter buried in the back to clean or the floor gets wet.
Millions of fridges, even at 2 filters a year $100 x millions is a lot of profit.

[Andrew More]

Honestly, the design is flawed to begin with. You bought a box that's supposed to get cold, and stay cold, with a leaky HOLE IN THE SIDE. The pitcher approach is so much better, if a little less flashy.

Not that that excuses the highway robbery of the stupid, unnecessary chip.

[ChrisA Edwards]

My JennAir(Whirlpool) has something similar, but I find if I go through the motion of changing it, it thinks it has a new filter, I.e. I remove the old one and put it back in.

I replace it every second time. It seems to work more in a timer than actual water flow.

We have whole house filtration,

[Roger Feeley]

Our Liebherr fridge doesn’t much care if it has a filter but I have one. We have an inside ice maker and no water dispenser so it really doesn’t use much water.

The ice maker has been replaced 4 times in the five years we’ve had the fridge. It was always covered under the original and then extended warranty. I got kind of tired with the local company’s poor diagnostic prowess so I got on the phone with liebherr. I managed to develop a working relationship with one senior tech which has helped a lot. At his direction, different tech is coming today (on Liebherr’s nickel) to take a crack at it. This was nice of them. I’m off warranty.

[Stan Calow]

I too push the reset button a few times before replacing. I always assumed that the "replace filter" alert was triggered by the amount of time since last replacement, not by any real measurement of capacity or amount of sediment trapped. If the chip was actually measuring something, resetting or taking it out and putting it back shouldn't work.

[Frank Pratt]

I'm grateful for threads like this. It's easy to make a purchase & later find out that they've sneakily engineered in a future revenue stream. But then any GE appliance has been off my list for a long time.

[Bruce Wrenn]

It's not just refrigerators, but almost everything. Toyota proposed a subscription service to keep the remote start function active. Jeep is currently being sued because their collision avoidance system is only an option. A Jeep rear ended a car, which the system most likely would have prevented.