Brandt CO27GWLU Review

Overall Rating

Build quality seems good - no cracked plastic shelves etc. Although I've not had an appliance last longer than 11 months!

Despite being an integrated appliance, this machine requires air vents to be fitted to provide enough ventilation. Otherwise it breaks.

I bought my Brandt fridge freezer in Jan 2003. Just over 2 years later my third appliance has broken down and can't be repaired. Apparently there isn't enough ventilation to keep the motor cool.

All this would be fine, except that it took Brandt's engineers 7 visits and 2 replacement appliances to figure out. Now that they have identified the problem, they want nothing more to do with it, despite it being them who installed the last 2 appliances. In the meantime we've lost 3 freezers-worth of food, had to take 10 days off work to wait for engineers and been without a fridge-freezer for, well, 20 weeks and counting.

The fridge freezers themselves seem less than ideal as they are designed to be integrated, yet don't last longer than 7 months, and Brandt themselves are impossible to contact, as they outsource all customer service to another company's call centre, with all the communication and decision-making problems that that brings. I've had no response to my letter to their Managing Director, if you're reading this, that's just rude!

I'd absolutely recommend buying another brand.