REVIEW

Normally, fridges are the least interesting appliance in the kitchen. Sure, they’re essential to making sure you don’t get salmonella or E.coli, but they’re also just a fridge. They have doors, the contents are cold, and that’s about it.

To buck the trend, LG has recently launched the MoodUP fridge, which takes fridges to an absolutely bonkers level.

In our household, it has lovingly been dubbed “the disco fridge”, because each door individually lights up, and you can set the colour from the app on your phone. Then, when you approach the fridge, the motion sensors will alert it to your presence, and the lights will turn on. Your fridge doesn’t look festive 24/7, but only five minutes to 2.5 hours after someone has gazed upon its festive visage.

It’s got the usual fancy LG fridge feature of being able to knock on the door to see whatever you’ve put in the door, but you can also give it a greenish tinge of backlighting, so you can pretend your condiments are in The Matrix.

Because we had the fridge in December, and the internet connected fridge knew this, out of the box the MoodUp defaulted to the red and green colours of Christmas. But, in the LG ThinQ app, you can go beyond just lights and activate the whole Christmas theme – which also plays Christmas carols out of the built-in Bluetooth speaker.

Yes, this is a fridge with a built-in speaker.

There are also other theme and music playlists you can activate, or you can customise your own lighting settings.

There are four different genres of themes built in, Season (which has Spring, Summer, etc), Place (Alaska, Paris, Santorini, etc), Healing (Rain, Bonfire, Sunset, Holiday and Dawn), and Pop. However, only Healing themes have built-in sound effects.

For example, Bonfire sounds like a crackling fire while the fridge displays varying shades of brown, or Rain makes rain sounds while the fridge looks blue. I don’t quite understand how “Holiday” fits into the “Healing” theme, but I’m sure a case could be made for it.

Aside from the lights, you can also connect your phone to the Bluetooth speaker. I have to admit that I did have reasonable hopes for a speaker built into a fridge this expensive, but it sounds tinny and pretty bad on complicated songs, so I wouldn’t consider it a replacement for having a dedicated music speaker in the kitchen if that’s what you were after.

The speaker is more of a novelty for the built-in music, rather than the central speaker you would use for a party.

In addition to those smart features, you can also get ‘door open’ alerts sent to your phone, if you have a family member who always leaves the door open mid-snack.

My favourite feature of the fridge is the layout of compartments in the fridge section. The shelves are at really good heights, there’s enough drawers, there is enough room in the door for a decent bottle of milk, and there is a secret cheese compartment built into the floor.

What’s great about the secret compartment is that the lid is clear (so you don’t forget about the aforementioned cheese), and it’s a sliding door rather than a door you need to lift, which uses the space a bit better.

There’s also lots of room in the freezer, and it keeps things nice and cold. But I must admit to being a bit disappointed with the ice maker. For $7999, I was expecting one of those fancy ice makers that does the different sizes of ice, and you just hold down the lever and the ice appears in your glass.

Basically, I was expecting the ice maker built into the fridge of your rich friend when you were in school, the ice maker that shows you’ve really made it. But in the MoodUP the ice maker is just a box that takes up room in the freezer and stops you from putting something more useful in its large space.

Within the ice maker is just a few regular ice cube trays that rotate to drop into an available drawer. It would have been more useful and taken up less space to just have a way of stopping ice trays from moving around in the top of a different freezer drawer.

The ice maker thing is a minor complaint, but for $8000, I would expect the world, and the world includes convenient ice of varying shapes and sizes.

All up, if you have a spare $8000, and want a fridge that will sing to you and be a real talking point in your kitchen, the LG MoodUP is the obvious (and only) choice.

Alice Clarke is a freelance writer