The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS is a high-end 36-inch wide French door refrigerator with a separate temperature-controlled pull-out drawer. It has an in-door ice and water dispenser, with the ice maker located in the fridge door. Its layout features a door-in-door compartment housing three deep bins, so you can access common items without fully opening the refrigerator door. There's split shelving in the fridge and adjustable drawer dividers in the freezer. Its cooling system consists of an inverter compressor and dual evaporators.
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Our Verdict
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS is a good option for everyday use. The temperature uniformity is generally very good with a dedicated evaporator in each section for temperature control. Unfortunately, the door bins are significantly warmer than the rest of the refrigerator compartment, so you'll want to store temperature-sensitive foods like milk or butter in the main compartment. It also offers good storage capacity in the fridge and freezer, with very deep door bins in the door-in-door and split fridge shelves that you can set to 14 positions to accommodate tall items like bottles. Produce preservation is decent, owing mainly to the separate in-fridge evaporator keeping humidity in the fridge high, but the produce drawers don't retain moisture well, leading to wilted leafy greens in a little over a week.
Excellent temperature uniformity in the freezer.
Deep bins in the door-in-door provide convenient and accessible storage.
Split shelving in the fridge, with adjustable heights to store taller items.
Produce drawers don't retain moisture well.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS does a decent job preserving produce. The dedicated evaporator in the fridge keeps humidity high, reducing evaporation, but the crisper drawers don't retain humidity well. They don't seal in moisture at a higher level than the rest of the fridge, so produce dries out, leading to wilted leafy greens and soft celery in a shorter span of time than it should for a fridge with an evaporator just for the refrigerator.
Dedicated evaporator in the fridge keeps humidity high.
Produce drawers don't retain moisture well.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS offers very good storage capacity in the refrigerator. Many clever, flexible features allow you to make good use of the space and store tall or large items like bottles in multiple locations. There are unusually deep door bins in the door-in-door in the fridge, accessible from both sides, and a height-adjustable bin that swivels in or out. The fridge has two split shelves that you can adjust to various heights. The middle pull-out drawer offers a storage area where you can set the temperature separately from the rest of the refrigerator.
Deep bins in the door-in-door provide convenient and accessible storage.
Split shelving in the fridge, with adjustable heights to store taller items.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS delivers good storage capacity in the freezer. There's plenty of storage flexibility in the freezer: two pull-out drawers with dividers to store large items like bulk boxed frozen food and pizza boxes, and even tiny bins tucked inside the main drawer door for small items like cookie dough tubes or frozen juice concentrate cans.
Good freezer storage, with lots of flexibility for storing large or wide items.
Small bins inside the freezer drawer door make every possible use of otherwise unused space.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS exhibits very good temperature uniformity overall. The freezer has excellent temperature uniformity since it has its own dedicated evaporator, and it's powered by an inverter compressor, with hardly any temperature swings as the compressor cycles. The refrigerator's temperature uniformity is only okay. There are small differences between the shelves, but the door bins are significantly warmer than the rest of the fridge. The door bins are so warm that there's an impact on food safety with temperature-sensitive items like milk or butter; these should be stored on fridge shelves.
Excellent temperature uniformity in the freezer.
Inverter compressor leads to steady temperatures in the freezer.
Door bins are significantly warmer than the rest of the fridge.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS provides only fair ice-making performance. The ice maker's production rate is only adequate for a few people, not enough for a large family. The ice storage tray is quite small and won't store much more than a day's worth of ice, so you'll have to save many days' worth of ice elsewhere in the freezer if you want to have a large party.
Ejector-type ice maker is more reliable than a twist-tray design.
Ice maker in the fridge tends to be less reliable.
Low ice production rate and storage capacity.
Performance Usages
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Differences Between Sizes And Variants
There's only one variant of the General Electric Profile PVD28BYNFS, and it's available in stainless steel. Here's a photo of the label for our test unit.
If you find another variant, please let us know in the comments, and we'll update our review.
Popular Refrigerator Comparisons
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS is an upper mid-range French-door refrigerator. It packs in a lot of eye-catching features, like a door-in-door storage compartment for beverages, a temperature-controlled pull-out drawer, independent of the fridge and freezer cabinets, twin evaporators, and an in-door water and ice dispenser. It also boasts high-capacity fridge and freezer cabinets. That said, its nifty door-in-door storage solution heavily compromises its ability to maintain a consistent temperature in the door bins next to the otherwise-similar GE Profile PGE29BYTFS. Beyond that, while its twin-evaporator design would help keep delicate produce crisp for longer by maintaining a high humidity level in the fridge cabinet, the PVD28BYNFS is comprehensively outperformed in this respect by the single-evaporator Bosch 500 Series B36FD52SNS. The latter simply has better-sealing crisper drawers that retain more moisture.
The Café CGE29DP2TS1 is a better fridge than the GE Profile PVD28BYNFS. The Café has a much better produce drawer seal and much better produce preservation performance. Since the Café doesn't have an ice maker in the fridge door, there's more capacity in the refrigerator, and the Café has much better temperature uniformity in the refrigerator. However, the GE does have an externally accessible in-door ice and water dispenser, if you find that more convenient than the Café's internal 'AutoFill' water pitcher.
The Hisense HRM260N6TSE is a better fridge than the nearly identical GE Profile PVD28BYNFS. The Hisense has better produce preservation than the GE, and the Hisense's separate temperature-controlled drawer is more capable than the GE's because you can configure it as a mild freezer. The Hisense also has better temperature uniformity in the fridge and freezer. All other aspects of these two fridges are just about identical, though the GE's ice maker has a faster production rate, and its ice tray has a higher capacity.
Test Results
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS offers very good refrigerator storage capacity. There's a lot of hardware in the fridge compartment, which takes up space, but the internal arrangement is very flexible for storage. The doors are very deep. On the left, this accommodates the ice maker and water and ice dispenser, but there's still enough depth for two shallow door bins and one medium-depth bin. The door-in-door is on the right. It houses extremely deep door bins that you can access from the inner or the outer door. At the top is a dairy bin attached to the inner door with a cover on the inside and a cutout for access from the outer door. In the middle is a deep bin you can swivel in or out of the door. You can also slide this bin up or down to any position to accommodate tall items like bottles. The bin at the bottom pivots out with the outer door.
Since these doors and bins are quite deep, the two split shelves and crisper drawers in the fridge are somewhat shallow. However, they can be positioned in any of 14 positions to accommodate tall items like stacks of leftover containers, large fruit like a pineapple, or even a whole watermelon. There are actually 18 slots, but the shelf brackets won't fit in the lowest slots.
The separate temperature-controlled drawer sits between the fridge and freezer and has a capacity of 3.61 cu. ft. (102.2 L). It has a beverage tray with can holder grooves that you can slide horizontally to accommodate taller items in the drawer. You can control the temperature in this drawer using the control panel on top of the drawer door, setting it for Meat (29 °F), Beverages (33 °F), Snacks (37 °F), or Wine (42 °F).
This refrigerator offers good storage capacity in the freezer. There are two pull-out drawers and movable dividers in each drawer that take up usable space but provide convenience and easier access. They're wide enough to accommodate large items like pizza boxes or family-sized lasagna trays, and the dividers can keep smaller, taller items like ice cream tubs separated. There are also small door bins tucked behind the main drawer front; these pivot downward to allow loading and retrieval of small items like bags of fruit or berries.
The cooling system in the GE Profile PVD28BYNFS consists of a single inverter compressor and two evaporators, one in the fridge and one in the freezer. Dual evaporators improve temperature and humidity control in each section. This system also separates the air in each compartment, eliminating odor transfer. Ducts with variable-position dampers direct the right amount of cold air from the evaporators to the ice maker in the fridge door and to the adjustable temperature drawer in the middle of the fridge.
The inverter compressor can adjust its speed based on load. This system saves power and delivers better temperature control compared to the older fixed-speed compressor design.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS's ice maker sits in a panel behind the left refrigerator door. While this keeps any hardware out of the refrigerator, saving space, it's not a good location for the ice maker from a reliability perspective. There's ducting directly from the evaporator delivering freezing air into the door through a seal. The cooling system must keep the ice maker area below freezing, but the rest of the refrigerator above freezing.
While the ice maker placement raises reliability concerns, its type doesn't. This fridge uses an ejector-type ice maker that utilizes a metal mold and a plastic rake to eject ice cubes after a heater detaches them from the mold. The ejector design is more reliable than the twist-tray type, which twists a plastic tray to detach the ice cubes. The plastic tray can get brittle over time, especially in freezing conditions, causing the plastic to crack.
There's an ice and water dispenser on the left door. It has a proximity-activated LED light, so it will light up as soon as anyone approaches it. Using the control panel, you can select ice cubes, crushed ice, or water, manually activate the light, and check the filter status. The system is hands-free and automatically fills a glass you place below the nozzle, stopping the water flow before it overfills.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS exhibits reasonable temperature uniformity in the refrigerator. There's only a small difference in temperature between the fridge shelves, so it shouldn't affect food. However, the difference between the shelves and the doors is too large to ensure food safety. You should place temperature-sensitive food like meats, milk, or cheese away from the door bins and use the bins only as a chiller for items like condiments and beverages.
A dual-evaporator refrigerator should perform much better here. This lack of uniformity is due to inevitable air leakage past all the extra door sealing surfaces and the lack of insulation in the doors, particularly the very thin right door.
The freezer shows excellent temperature uniformity. There's very little difference in temperature in various locations throughout the freezer. The inverter compressor and dedicated freezer evaporator keep temperature swings under tight control as the compressor cycles, since it doesn't have to cool the entire refrigerator compartment.
This refrigerator's produce preservation performance is decent. The dual evaporator arrangement keeps humidity in the fridge compartment fairly high, but there are large humidity swings as the moisture leaks out and the compressor cycles. Worse, the advantage of that slightly more-humid-than-average fridge compartment is negated by the poorly-sealing crisper drawers, which lose moisture to the rest of the fridge. Produce dries out faster than it should, causing wilted lettuce and soft celery to wilt faster than they would in a fridge with better humidity retention.
The GE Profile PVD28BYNFS's ice-making rate is reasonable. It'll make enough ice for drinks for a few people, but it won't make enough for an impromptu party.
This refrigerator's ice-making capacity is only okay. The ice maker tray stores barely more than a day's worth of ice. This amount of ice is enough for a couple of people to enjoy during meal times, but not for large families or dinner parties.
Note that the tray is behind a panel in the left fridge door. The only practical way to obtain ice is through the dispenser. If you wanted more ice at a faster rate than the dispenser provides, it'll be difficult to repeatedly open the panel and scoop all the ice from the tray for storage.