Is Consumer Reports Accurate For Appliance Reliability?

Your high-end wine cooler breaks right after you stock it full of your favorite French wines or hours before Thanksgiving dinner, your oven fails.

You want your appliances to work.

It’s a significant imposition on your time, and then there is the aggravation of finding a competent technician to fix your appliance on your schedule.

Consumer Reports just published their reliability report ranking 25 manufacturers with individual product breakdowns.

I wanted to compare it against our reliability numbers based on over 65,000 service calls our 35 techs logged in the last 2 years.

In the end, you will learn about the most reliable appliance brands definitively.

I picked commodity products people use every day for a comparison, namely top and front load laundry as well as dishwashers and French door refrigerators.

How Yale Measures Appliance Reliability

Yale Appliance Service Technician

Our reliability reporting is simple. We look at brand repairs and divide by sales for a percentage over 12 months.

The brands with the lowest rates are considered the most reliable brands.

We report on every brand calculated from our dispatched service calls only. We also consider most reliable brands based on a minimum amount of units sold.

For example, a company with ten units sold and no repairs are not more reliable than a company with 100 units sold and five repairs.

How Consumer Reports Measures Appliance Reliability

Consumer Reports has a hybrid approach to reliability. They do not have service techs in the field, so they perform lab tests.

They also run predictive analysis based on surveys. This is a direct quote from their article.

“To calculate predicted reliability, we asked members how many times the products they own broke or stopped working as well as they should. We used that data to estimate how new models from a given brand will hold up over the first five years.”

They have 381,000 respondents over the last ten years - a slightly larger sample size than our yearly home service visits.

How do lab testing and predictive analysis matchup against actual service calls and problem statistics?

You are about to find out.

Least Reliable Appliance Brands

Interestingly enough, both Consumer Reports' and our appliance reliability have the same least reliable manufacturers.

We service what we sell, and service under warranty at a loss (that's why you can’t find service in warranty).

We cannot afford to represent a brand with chronic issues. Every company has problems. However, it has to be a manageable percentage.

Let’s take a closer look at individual product reliability statistics.

Laundry

Yale's Most Reliable Front Load Washers 2018-2019:

Yale's Most Reliable Front Load Washers 2017-2018:

Source: “Washing Machines.” Front-Load Washer Ratings, Consumer Reports, 2018, www.consumerreports.org/products/front-load-washer/brand-reliability/.

Other than LG, it's a completely different list. Electrolux has a huge amount of visits at 39.44% in 2018 spiking from 19% in 2017.

Electrolux's subsidiary, Frigidaire, and Speed Queen, were the only two companies with higher repair rates.

Speaking of Speed Queen, that was Consumer Reports most reliable washer brand for this year and a perfect 10/10 for laundry.

Yale's Most Reliable Top Load Washers 2018-2019:

Yale's Most Reliable Top Load Washers 2017-2018:

Consumer Reports Top-Load Agitator Washer Predicted Reliability 2019:

Source: “Washing Machines.” Top-Load Agitator Washer Ratings, Consumer Reports, 2018, www.consumerreports.org/products/top-load-agitator-washer/brand-reliability/.

I like Speed Queen as a brand. It is solidly built almost like the old Maytag everyone wished they still had.

In terms of actual service, however, it wasn’t number 1 in its category with double the average in service calls at 26.75% versus 13.41% for the average.

Their machine also increased from 2017 from 14.89% to 26.75%. This rate will probably decrease as the problems are worked out in their newer machines.

Buy Speed Queen for their 5 or 7-year full warranty, but expect issues along the way greater than the average.

Let's look at dishwashers.

Dishwashers

Yale's Most Reliable Dishwashers 2018-2019:

Yale's Most Reliable Dishwashers 2017-2018:

Consumer Reports Dishwasher Predicted Reliability 2019:

Source: “Dishwashers.” Dishwasher Ratings, Consumer Reports, 2018,  www.consumerreports.org/products/dishwasher/brand-reliability/.

Bosch is high on both lists, but not number 1 on ours.

Whirlpool has a higher dishwasher reliability rating, but that is a basic-builder dishwasher and typically not a product people buy for themselves.

Miele wasn't as reliable in 2018 as they were in 2017. A shipment of frozen motors hurt their numbers last year, yet they rate as a 10/10 on Consumers.

Thermador is a subsidiary of Bosch, yet has been middle of the pack for reliability. Consumer Reports has Thermador as 10/10 as well.  

LG was reliable (but based only on a limited amount sold) yet it was a poor performer on Consumer Reports,

Which leaves us with Samsung.

I have never been bashed so much for supporting one brand, even though my support is based wholly on numbers only.

I wrote an article "Is Samsung a Reliable Appliance Brand," and I thought there were pitchforks and torches outside my office.

People even said I was making millions of dollars by sponsorships. That’s insane. They couldn’t pay me enough.

Here are the facts.

The brand looks better, functions better, and is about the same price as a Frigidaire, Electrolux, or Maytag appliance.

The dishwasher is one of the best at 9.29% serviced on our list and one of the worst on Consumer Reports at 2/10.

Let’s look at the appliance industries least reliable category to illustrate this point (professional ranges have more service calls, but much of that is customer education and installation issues).

Counter-Depth French Door Refrigerators

Yale's Most Reliable Counter-Depth French Door Refrigerators 2018-2019:

Yale's Most Reliable Counter-Depth French Door Refrigerators 2017-2018:

Consumer Reports Refrigerator Predicted Reliability 2019:

Source: “Refrigerators.” French-Door Refrigerator Ratings, Consumer Reports, 2018,  www.consumerreports.org/products/french-door-refrigerator/brand-reliability/.

The only semi-reliable counter depth French door refrigerator is Samsung’s with half the service calls at 12.65% in one year of the average of all other brands 26.36 %.

However, it rates as a 5/10 on Consumers.

They also sell more highly technical products like the four-door French door refrigerator and the internet-ready Samsung Family Hub refrigerator.

Samsung is the most reliable brand sold based on their reliability in every category. The only more reliable products are basic, builder-grade.

Samsung is also now the most widely sold brand in the US.

However, they lack service techs and support in many markets to support their growth. That is their main problem…..Once you have a problem, it becomes an issue.

You want to check for local service technicians in your area before you buy any Samsung appliance (as opposed to after you own it).

Then again, you can say that about every brand.

Is Consumer Reports Accurate?

First, I am not bashing Consumer Reports at all.

At least they try. You read appliance blogs today, and every appliance retailer/blogger loves every product.

They wouldn't be as forgiving or promotional if they had to fix unsolvable problems from genuinely unhappy customers.

For example, they wouldn't love a manufacturer with known refrigerator problems or another with a lint issue in their dryers.

Consumer Reports’ main problem is their 10-year database. What was reliable 5-10 years ago is not necessarily what you should buy today.

Look again at this chart of reliability in washers just in the last 2 years.

Yale's Most Reliable Washers 2018-2019:

Yale's Most Reliable Washers 2017-2018:

Each year tells a different story. In 2017, you would be better off buying a Whirlpool for reliability. In 2018, LG was a more reliable washer, according to the numbers.

Moreover, that is just one example from 2 years of hard data.

This industry has changed radically just in the last 3 years.

In the old days, you bought a Maytag washer designed, built, and manufactured in Newton, Iowa for 100 years.

In the near future, you will have a product designed by a Korean company, built in the US with parts sourced from China or Vietnam.

These changes can affect reliability going forward. It's best to look at a recent trend of actual service work rather than a 10-year database.

To answer the question is Consumer Reports accurate for appliance reliability, it is a decent guide of what not to buy, but the Consumer Reports model of predictive reliability is only partially accurate.

Real data based on actual service calls is more accurate than a longer predictive trend for what appliances you should buy now.

Additional Resources

Have questions on appliances? Read the Yale Appliance Buying Guide with the 10 most frequently asked questions, the best time to buy appliances as well as detailed profiles of all the brands. Well over 560,000 people have read a Yale Guide.

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