Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 Review
An excellent-value four-door fridge freezer
Verdict
Coming in at a good price, the four-door Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 offers a huge amount of fridge space, which runs the entire width of the unit. The room inside doesn’t provide much flexibility, but with so many wide shelves, you can fit in a lot of fresh food. This isn’t the cheapest fridge freezer to run, although the low purchase price makes it an attractive buy nonetheless. Most importantly, stable temperature control ensures that your food will stay fresh.
Pros
- Huge fridge
- Excellent value
- Decent freezer space
- Flexible MyZone drawer
- Stable temperatures
Cons
- Fridge layout isn’t flexible
- Not the cheapest to run
Availability
- UKRRP: £899.99
- USAunavailable
- Europeunavailable
- Canadaunavailable
Key Features
- TypeA four-door fridge freezer, the top section is fridge-only and spans the entire width of the unit. You get a whopping 354 litres of space in the fridge and a decent 174 litres for the freezer.
Introduction
The Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 is a four-door fridge freezer, giving you a large fridge section that spans the entire top width of the unit, plus two freezer compartments at the bottom. For easy access to the fridge and for storing larger items, this configuration makes a lot more sense than a regular American-style model with its side-by-side fridge and freezer.
Stable temperatures, plenty of space and a frost-free design at a low price make this a good choice for those who need the huge capacity. A little more flexibility with the internal layout would have been welcome, and this model doesn’t benefit from the lowest running costs.
Design and Features
- Huge amounts of space inside
- Flexible storage drawers
- Could do with a bit more flexibility
Quite wide and tall, the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 isn’t particularly deep, measuring 1900 x 908 x 648mm. It’s likely to protrude beyond your average countertop, but not by much.
It’s all too easy to make a fridge freezer look like a solid block, but the recessed handles around the four doors help break up the metal surface and make this fridge freezer look neat.
Although you can open the left- and right-hand-side fridge doors independently, opening them together gives you the full scope of the huge 354-litre fridge. Spanning the full 90cm width, there’s a cavernous amount of space inside, and you’ll be able to slide even the longest items easily into place.
If you mostly buy fresh food, this kind of layout is great, since you won’t have to bend down to access the contents.
You get three door pockets on each side (six in total), with space to move them around. In the default configuration, you can fit larger items, such as 2-litre milk cartons in the side easily enough.
The top two pockets don’t offer as much space; I couldn’t get my regular ketchup bottle to stand up anywhere but the bottom pocket.
Opt for a 70/30 fridge freezer, such as the Bosch Serie 6 KGE49AICAG and you’ll get a more flexible layout, although less space overall.
Haier provides two egg holders (six eggs per holder, for a total of 12), although you can’t fit two side-by-side in a door pocket. You’ll either need to use one egg holder or use two shelves for both.
While the main shelves are large, there’s no flexibility to change the height of any of them. As it stands, you can’t stand up taller items, such as wine bottles on the shelves as there isn’t enough clearance. Fortunately, there is a bottle holder hanging off the top shelf.
At the bottom are two drawers. The one on the left is the Humidity Zone, which keeps humidity at 90%, which Haier says results in keeping fruit and vegetables fresh for two times longer.
On the right, there’s another drawer of the same size, which is the MyZone drawer, which has lower humidity than the rest of the fridge and a slider that lets you adjust its temperature. It features icons for meat, drinks and fruit/veg. On the meat setting, you get temperatures close to 0ºC.
With T-ABT, the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 releases tourmaline and cordierite ions into your refrigerator’s airflow to destroy up to 99.9% of bacteria automatically.
Behind the bottom two doors you’ll find the freezer compartments (a total of 174 litres). Each one has two slide-out shelves, plus two drawers. It’s all pretty standard, but the six individual compartments make it easy to spread out your food and to find what you’re looking for.
Neatly, Haier has built-in two LED lights, one each under the fridge doors. When you open a freezer compartment, the LED turns on, so you can see into the freezer. And, since the light is on the underside of the door above, it always illuminates the freezer, no matter how full it is.
A control panel to adjust fridge and freezer temperatures sits on the outside. There’s a child lock to stop settings being fiddled with, and a couple of special modes: Super-Cool and Super-Freeze accelerate cooling of the fridge and freezer compartments respectively, and should be used for adding larger quantities of food. There’s also a Holiday mode, which keeps the fridge at 17ºC: this prevents mould growth, but helps save energy when you won’t be using the fridge for a prolonged period.
Both the fridge and freezer compartments are frost-free, too, so you’ll never have to defrost this model.
Performance
- Stable temperatures across the fridge and freezer
- Running costs are a little higher than some of the competition
To test the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP, I loaded it up with freezer blocks across the fridge and freezer compartments to simulate food, then I put in temperature sensors that monitor the internal temperature.
With the fridge set to 4ºC, the average temperature was 4.4ºC, with a maximum temperature of 7.6ºC and a minimum of 3.4ºC. With a standard deviation of +/- 0.46ºC, it shows that temperatures are largely very close to average temperature (anything under 1 is a good result).
Cutting the power to the fridge for three hours saw temperatures rise by 2.5ºC. This isn’t enough to spoil your food, and a better result than achieved by older models, such as the Hisense RQ689N4WF1.
The top of the fridge was a touch warmer than the bottom, as is usual, although with an average temperature of 5.4ºC it’s still very good. And, the MyZone drawer managed a cold average of 0.89ºC.
Moving to the freezer, I set it to -18ºC and recorded an average temperature of -19.86ºC, with a standard deviation of +/- 0.71ºC (again, under 1 is a good result). Cutting power, I saw a temperature increase of 5.7ºC after three hours – which is decent enough, since food won’t defrost. You’ll have to spend a fair bit more to get better performance.
An F-rated appliance, the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 draws an average of 360kWh per year, which for running costs works out at £56.70 a year. Given the total space of 528 litres on offer, that works out at 10.7p per litre of space.
For cheaper running costs, you’ll have to spend more on an appliance, such as the LG DoorCooling GBB92MCBAP, which has an A-rating and a running cost of just 4.72p per litre.
That’s not to say that the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 is poor, but there are more efficient fridge freezers available.
Conclusion
It isn’t the most efficient fridge freezer, then, and it doesn’t offer the most flexible interior space, but the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 delivers very stable temperature control, clever drawers (especially the MyZone option), and frost-free and anti-bacterial technology. There’s also a huge amount of space on offer, particularly in the fridge section, and the four-door design is brilliant for those who mostly buy fresh food. Given its comparatively low price, the Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 is a great buy – but if you’re after something different, check out my guide to the best fridge freezers.
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Should you buy it?
If you want a large amount of fridge space that’s easy to access, this fridge freezer is for you. Taking up the entire top compartment, you can easily fit in large items or fill the fridge with fresh food.
This isn’t the cheapest fridge freezer to run, and if you want to keep daily costs down then you may want to seek out a more efficient model. The fridge space also isn’t particularly flexible since you can’t adjust shelf layout.
Verdict
Coming in at a good price, the four-door Haier Cube 90 Series 5 HTF-540DP7 offers a huge amount of fridge space, which runs the entire width of the unit. The room inside doesn’t provide much flexibility, but with so many wide shelves, you can fit in a lot of fresh food. This isn’t the cheapest fridge freezer to run, although the low purchase price makes it an attractive buy nonetheless. Most importantly, stable temperature control ensures that your food will stay fresh.
FAQs
No, this is a frost-free fridge freezer, so you won’t get ice build-up.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
