Frigidaire EFIC255 review

We have not lived with an EFIC255 for a season. What follows comes from Frigidaire's published specification, from the retailer listings that carry the dimensional and electrical data, and from independent testing and owner reports where those exist. Where a judgment rests on someone else's measurement rather than our own hands, we say so in the sentence.

That matters in a category where a great deal of coverage is written in the first person by people who have not opened the box. How we pick sets out the method and what we refuse to assert.

Every figure here is published by Frigidaire or carried on the major retailer listings for the model, not estimated by us.

Two rows are worth pausing on. The 16.5 inch height is the one that decides whether this machine can live where you want it: it is specified to fit under a standard wall cabinet, but it needs clearance above and behind for airflow, and crowding a compressor is how a 44 lb rating quietly becomes a 30 lb reality. The second is the 3 lb basket, which is small - and deliberately so.

The published rate works out at roughly 24 oz of ice an hour, which independent testing by Reviewed found to be about par for machines at this price. In household terms, 44 lb a day is far more nugget ice than a family of four can drink; the constraint is almost never the daily figure.

The constraint is the basket. Three pounds is two or three tall drinks plus a refill, and because this is not a freezer, ice sitting in the basket slowly melts back into the reservoir to be refrozen. That sounds wasteful and is actually the design working as intended: the basket is a buffer, not storage. You are meant to take ice as it is made, and the machine is meant to keep up - which at 24 oz an hour it does for a household and does not for a party of twelve.

The practical consequence is that output per hour matters more than the number on the box. If you want a full basket at a specific time, you want scheduling, and that is an argument for a machine with an app - the comparison is laid out in GE Opal vs Frigidaire nugget ice maker.

Every countertop nugget machine is loud, because a compressor, an auger and falling ice are three noise sources in one box. The EFIC255's specific problem, as Reviewed describes it, is not volume but character: an irregular growl rather than a steady hum, which the ear keeps noticing instead of filing away as background.

We have taken no decibel readings of our own and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we will say is that this is the complaint that recurs most consistently in owner reports, and that it should decide where the machine goes. In a utility room, a basement bar or a garage fridge setup it is a non-issue. Three feet from where someone is watching television, it is the thing you will regret.

• No interior light. Reviewed flags this and it is a genuine daily annoyance: the viewing window helps, but checking the level in a dim kitchen means opening the drawer.
• No app, no connectivity. A feature for some buyers and a missing feature for others. It is the whole positioning of this machine.
• Mixed owner reports on longevity. Reliability feedback on this model is not uniformly positive, and Frigidaire's warranty on it runs a year. We cannot verify failure rates and we will not invent a number for them.

An ice maker is a compressor in a plastic case that runs for years. Every software layer added to one is another thing that can stop working for a reason unrelated to ice: an account migration, a firmware update, a cloud service retired by a company that has moved on.

The EFIC255 has a touch control panel, a self-clean button and nothing else. There is no pairing step, no account and no notification. If your objection to the whole smart-appliance category is that a kitchen gadget should not need a login, this machine agrees with you, and that is the single clearest reason to choose it over the Opal or the GoveeLife.

The cost of that position is scheduling. You cannot tell this machine to have a full basket at seven, so if you entertain on a timetable you will be running it in advance and taking the ice out to a cooler. That is a workflow, not a defect - but it is the workflow an app would remove.

The reservoir is in the top half and you fill it by hand, which removes any plumbing decision and makes you the water supply. On a hot weekend you will be refilling, and the honest version of this machine's convenience is: much less effort than trays, more effort than a plumbed-in maker.

Scale and biofilm in the reservoir are what actually end the life of most countertop ice makers, which makes the self-clean function more significant than it sounds - a cleaning cycle that runs itself is a cleaning cycle that happens. Use filtered water if your supply is hard; it is the cheapest life extension available for any machine in this category. Our how to clean an ice maker guide covers the routine and the interval.

On taste: Reviewed found the ice clean-tasting and noted the pellets are harder than those from some premium competitors, which means they melt more slowly and dilute a drink less quickly. That is a real point in the EFIC255's favor and the one performance finding we would not have predicted from the specification.

Nugget ice is compacted flake: an enormous amount of surface area per unit of mass, with air and water trapped in the structure. That is exactly why it chews, and exactly why it waters a drink down fast. In an iced coffee, a soda or a long highball that is a feature - the drink is supposed to be cold, long and gradually diluted.

In a stirred, spirit-forward drink it is a problem you cannot design around. Buying a nugget machine for an old fashioned is the most common expensive mistake in this category, and no amount of harder pellets fixes it. If that is your use case, read clear ice vs nugget ice and then best clear ice makers - or just buy a mold, because the freezer you already own does most of the job.

The cheapest setup that covers both: one nugget machine for long drinks, one clear-ice mold for short ones. Best clear ice molds covers the freezer half for a small fraction of a second machine.

• Buy it if you want a lot of chewable ice, you have somewhere to put a noisy appliance, and you would rather not have a smart appliance at all.
• Buy it if the household drinks iced coffee, seltzer and long drinks daily - that is the use case where this machine stops being a gadget and starts being infrastructure.
• Skip it if the machine has to live in an open-plan room where people talk. The irregular noise is the complaint that sticks.
• Skip it if you host on a schedule and want a full basket on demand. Buy the scheduling instead.
• Skip it entirely if your reason for shopping is whiskey or a stirred cocktail. Wrong ice, wrong purchase, and a mold costs a tenth as much.

For where it sits against the rest of the category, best nugget ice makers has the full field, and why are nugget ice makers so expensive explains where the money in these machines actually goes. If the ice is destined for tall drinks, the glass matters too - best everyday drinking glasses covers the tumblers that take an ice column without filling up.