F&P shuts door on flaw claim

By Yoke Har Lee

Fisher & Paykel Industries says although its new Active Smart fridge has no engineering flaws, the company still has some work to do on some initial warranty issues.

The company shut down refrigerator production for four weeks late last year, but says that was to allow it to increase production, rather than to fix any problems with the new fridges.

Company officials, concerned about news reports alluding to the fridge's supposed problems, said the two main warranty issues involved the butter conditioner and noise levels. However, they said these were no longer a problem.

"As it stands, the warranty costs are coming down, we have a growing market share in New Zealand," said Richard Blundell, F&P's corporate affairs manager.

Engineering manager Thomas Neitzert said: "The initial problem was associated with the start-up in production for a new model. We had that before with other models. There were a number of new tools we had to commission. Production rate was a little bit low in the beginning but that has been overcome now. That also becomes a quality issue in the end because when you have problems making enough, you might be rushed to finish up because you know there are customers out there who want to buy your refrigerator."

Marketing manager Malcom Harris said: "If you look at our warranty data before and after Active Smart, they are very very similar, given we had a very poor start-up in manufacturing. In terms of warranty issues, yes, the butter conditioner would rank as the number one grievance."

Mr Neitzert said because the Active Smart fridge was designed so a layman could change the door between left and right-hand opening, it required proper alignment at the manufacturing level so that all the right contacts were made between the door and the cabinet for the door-mounted butter conditioner to function.

But the problem was not so major that a recall was required, he said.

As for the noise issue, Mr Harris said the Active Smart refrigeration was driven by variable speed fans, so everytime the fans changed speed, the noise changed.

The issue was not the noise level but the pitch.

He said improvements have since led the fridge to be less noisy than competitor models.