The Best Cheap Mini Fridge

Mini fridges are great companions for small apartments, dorm rooms, hangouts, and offices. They’re ideal for storing beverages, snacks, daily lunches, and leftovers, and the larger ones can also store perishable items for a few days at a time.

However, mini fridges fall short of full-size, all-purpose refrigerators in several key ways. Most minis have no crisper drawer, so produce will lose its fresh taste and texture after a few days. (Our upgrade pick has one, which is a plus.) Freezer burn is common, too, and the freezer compartments don’t reach anywhere near the 0 degree Fahrenheit threshold for safe, long-term meat storage.

We think most mini fridges will work absolutely fine, as long as they have a compressor. If you end up with a lead on a great deal for a mini fridge that we don’t cover here, or if you just find yourself at a big-box store trying to figure out which one to buy in a hurry, you don’t need to overthink it.

We put in roughly 25 hours of research and hands-on testing to make this guide’s recommendations. After setting up the picks and gathering initial impressions, we left a couple of our favorite models running, each with a head of lettuce and a frozen meal inside, for a week. And after that test wrapped up, we kept using them to store drinks and snacks, gathering in total a couple of weeks’ worth of performance data.

But that isn’t the only experience we’ve had testing mini fridges. Both the editor and writer of this guide covered appliances for Reviewed.com, and we did a couple of mini fridge roundups together in 2012 and 2013. For our most recent update, we conducted additional research online.

The methodology has been a bit different each time we’ve done a roundup, but we keep coming away with the same conclusion: All mini fridges work fine. They’re all built around similar parts, just in different capacities with different shelves. Any of them will get cold enough to store food for a few days. So go ahead and buy whatever is cheap and available, even if that means buying a used one.

That said, we set out to find the standout models, the ones with the best shelves and the best prices, for anyone who wants a slightly better experience with their mini fridge.

We started by making a spreadsheet of the best-selling mini fridges at major retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot. We compared capacity, size, price, and other specs, and we tracked user ratings. We also made sure to consider only fridges that use compressors for cooling, as opposed to thermoelectric elements, which don’t get cold enough to keep food safe.

People need to fit small fridges in all kinds of spaces, so we broke the category down into two divisions based on size: cube mini fridges and tall mini fridges.

Cube mini fridges are short enough to fit under a desk or even into a shelving unit, but they’re also great for dorm rooms, tiny apartments, game rooms, office lunch areas, or anywhere else you want a compact fridge, really. They’re handy for keeping a stash of drinks or snacks, and maybe a day’s lunch for two people. Most cube fridges have a similar capacity and shelving layout.

Tall mini fridges are available with a wider variety of capacities and shelving options. They’re too tall to fit under a typical 30-inch desk, but if you need to store a couple of cases of canned drinks or a few days’ worth of food, one of these should do the trick. (We also plan to test two-door mini fridges with separate refrigerator and freezer compartments soon.)

For our initial round of testing in 2016, we settled on five finalists—two cube models and three tall models.

Any fridge needs to keep food safe to eat, mini fridges being no exception. All of our previous experience with these appliances told us that they’re up to that task. But just to be sure, we ran some tests to confirm that each fridge could keep food safe and appetizing.

We used a low-temperature digital thermometer to take readings in each appliance. For the fridge compartment, we recorded the maximum and minimum temperatures it reached over a period of half an hour. Then we did the same for the freezer compartment. After narrowing down the group to our top two picks, we recorded overnight temperature readings to be sure that they worked well.

Alongside that test, we stashed a frozen, microwavable meal into each model’s freezer compartment and checked it periodically over several days to confirm that it stayed frozen, and that the appliance kept freezer burn to a minimum. We also put half a head of iceberg lettuce on the top shelf of the fridge to see how well the fridge could preserve perishable produce, as well as to see if it accidentally froze items sitting near the freezer.

In another test we gauged how much stuff we could fit in, which has as much to do with the shelving layout as with the manufacturer’s claimed capacity. We used standard 12-ounce soda cans as our main unit of measurement, though we also took notes on whether the fridges could store some commonly used, awkwardly shaped items like gallon jugs, snacks, and takeout boxes.

We also considered factors such as compressor noise (they were all fine) and whether cans came flying out of the in-door shelves when we opened the door too fast (they always did).

We think the cube-shaped Midea WHS-65L is a great choice. It’s cheap and surprisingly spacious despite its small footprint, it offers solid temperature performance, and it boasts a freezer compartment to boot. It also has some decent user reviews.

The Midea WHS-65L is basically the same machine as most other cube fridges, as far as we can tell, but it’s usually the most affordable one you can get. If you see another one for cheaper, go for it—that fridge will probably work just fine. (Some of them don’t have freezers, though, and it’s up to you if that’s a dealbreaker.)

Because of a cube fridge’s limited space (1.6 cubic feet) compared with tall mini fridges, such a model is probably not the best option if you plan to rely on it to store more than one or two days’ worth of food for more than two people, but it really depends on your circumstances. For what it’s worth, in our tests we were able to fit 46 12-ounce cans inside the Midea WHS-65L.

We recorded a fridge temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit after a half hour. That fell to 35 degrees after we turned down the dial, but either way, those are perfectly adequate temperatures for food storage.

In our tests, we recorded pretty wide temperature fluctuations in the WHS-65L’s freezer, which jumped from 11 to 21 degrees Fahrenheit, and 10 to 20 degrees at a lower setting. (Freezer temperatures in all mini fridges tend to fluctuate a lot, probably because it’s fundamentally inefficient to have an unsealed freezer shelf inside a compartment that’s mostly just a fridge.) Those shifts in temperature are substantial enough to cause slight freezer burn within a few days, affecting the taste and texture of food. And because the freezer never came close to reaching the 0-degree threshold for safe, long-term meat storage in our tests, you’ll have to find a better place to keep your venison steaks for the winter.

We did not have problems with temperature fluctuation in the fridge section of the WHS-65L, though finding the right temperature setting can be tricky since the temperature dial has no markings. But given how finicky some mini fridges are, if you plan to use your fridge to store food that could make you sick if it spoils, consider buying a fridge thermometer to ensure your food is safe to eat.

The business end of the Midea WHS-65L seemed a bit delicate and cheaply built—but that was the case with every mini fridge we looked at. The shelves and door were fine. But the wiring looked as if it were soldered in a hurry, and the compressor and all its connections were left unprotected on the back of the appliance. What this means is that your fridge could sustain damage pretty easily in transit. If you suspect that you've received a broken unit, you probably have—return it immediately.

The Danby Diplomat DCR044B1BM is an updated version of our previous upgrade pick, the Danby Designer DCR044A2. (We originally tested the DCR044A2; the DCR044B1BM should perform very similarly.) We like the Danby Diplomat DCR044B1BM more than other mini fridges, mostly because it has better shelves and a smarter layout, including a crisper drawer and a full-width freezer. That means you can store more food and perishable items more comfortably. Temperature performance is safe and as satisfactory as you’ll find in a mini fridge at this price.

Designed with versatile shelves that maximize storage, the DCR044B1BM is advertised to have a capacity of 4.4 cubic feet. This is in the same range as competing models, but the Danby uses its space better than the rest.

The Danby’s integrated door shelving can accommodate standard 12-ounce cans. Its lower door shelf will fit taller items like juice bottles or tallboy cans.

You can raise or lower the Danby’s adjustable glass shelves throughout the interior to accommodate items of different heights. We like that this model includes a separate crisper drawer, which works by regulating airflow and humidity that can potentially come into contact with the contents of the drawer. This means that you can keep fruits, vegetables, and other more perishable items fresh for longer since they aren’t exposed to outside air each time you open the fridge.

The Danby also has a slide-out tray under the freezer, which serves as the drip tray during the defrost cycle.

If you’re looking to store frozen goods, the freezer in the Danby is just as wide as the fridge itself, which is a big improvement on the smaller, partial-width freezers in many other models. Our temperature tests showed that both sizes of freezers hold temperatures roughly equally, so it’s a no-brainer to choose the extra space.

For food storage and preservation, this Danby should work as well as any mini fridge. Across our testing, its predecessor (the now-discontinued Danby Designer DCR044A2) sat squarely within the FDA-recommended temperature range for refrigerators (35 °F to 38 °F). In the freezer, the usual resting temp was about 9.9 °F. That’s a bit of a problem for long-term storage (which we’ll cover below), but it’s absolutely typical for the mini fridges we’ve tested, and fine for storing frozen meals for a few days at a time.

Another space-saving consideration of the DCR044B1BM is its height: It’s only 33 inches tall. It isn’t short enough to fit beneath a standard 30-inch desk if you’re looking to purchase a mini fridge for the office, but it may fit beneath a bar shelf or countertop.

The SPT RF-164SS cube is literally the same fridge as our pick, just with a different door and logo, and it usually costs about $20 more. If you can’t find our pick for a good price, go with the SPT RF-164SS, or just about any other cube fridge—we think they’re basically the same appliances, though some have freezer compartments and others don’t.

The Midea WHS-160R is a tall mini fridge with the same fridge capacity as our upgrade pick. However, this Midea model has only a partial-width freezer, the can dispenser is prone to letting cans slip through the bottom, and the shelves are wire rather than glass or plastic, so spills will spread through the entire interior, and some items won’t balance as nicely.

We plan to test the Frigidaire EFR1760AMZ, a cube mini fridge with a retro design and attached bottle opener. We also have our eyes on two-door mini fridges, including the GE GDE03GLKLB, Hisense LMT43M6AVE, and the Midea WHD-113FB1.

Annie Chou contributed reporting.