Samsung Series 8 RM70F67RDR Review

Design and Features

• French door design
• AI Hybrid Cooling
• SmartThings compatible

The Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR is a French door fridge freezer, where the fridge compartment takes up the entire top, and the freezer is in the section below. It’s an increasingly popular choice, even being used in some lower cost appliances, such as the Hoover H-Fridge 700 Maxi HSC918EWXK.

It’s my favourite style of fridge freezer, as the things you most commonly want to access are available without having to bend down, and the full-width fridge makes it easy to store bigger items.

Here, Samsung has done a brilliant job with the fridge layout, making it one of the most flexible that I’ve seen, and with a massive 414 litres of space. First up, the door pockets (three per door) are extra deep with high walls.

That makes it really easy to keep larger items on them, whether that’s large bottles of drink, bigger milk containers or jars of pickles and condiments. I found that I could have a lot of my regularly used items within quick grasp.

There are then three shelves that run the full width of the fridge, with the middle one able to go in one of two positions, depending on where you want to store things. There’s good headroom on the middle shelf, with plenty of room for tall items, such as beer bottles or drinks cartons. The top shelf is a bit more constricted, but you’ll still fit jars and drinks cans easily enough.

I really like the split shelf in the middle, which slides back to allow very tall items to stand up: handy if you’ve got an open bottle of wine that you can’t lie flat.

At the bottom are two full-sized drawers for fresh foods. They’re a good size, and slide out a long way, so they’re easy to load and unload.

In the middle is a tiny little drawer, which may be good for storing a cucumber or courgette. On Samsung fridge freezers with a water dispenser, such as the Samsung Family Hub RF65DG9H0EB1EU, this drawer would be where the water filter goes.

At the bottom is the 255-litre freezer, available via two doors. Often, on this style fridge freezer, one of the lower compartments has its own temperature control, so it can be a freezer or extra fridge space; with the Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR the freezer space is one.

I think that’s fine for the vast majority of people: once a freezer’s loaded up, it’s hard to squeeze everything into one side to get extra fridge space.

It’s a nicely organised space, with three good-sized door pockets on each door. Inside, each side has two large slide-out trays and a big drawer at the bottom, so it’s easy to keep all of your frozen food and find it.

There’s no water or ice dispenser, but Samsung does provide a handy ice box, with ice tray on top.

Control of the fridge is via the simple control panel on the inside, which gives you temperature controls for the fridge and the freezer.

With this model, there’s a traditional compressor, as you’d expect, but it’s also the first fridge from the company to use AI Hybrid Cooling, which also adds a Peltier element into the mix.

A Peltier element, more commonly found on mini-fridges, generates a cold surface when an electrical current is passed through it. Peltier elements run with little power, but they need constant power to maintain a cold environment, which is why mini-fridges are expensive to run.

Here, the Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR can use the low-power Peltier element when just a minor temperature correction is required, such as when the fridge door has been opened, rather than having to use the compressor. Samsung says that AI Hybrid Cooling helps save money, while maintaining more stable temperatures; things that I found to be true on both counts (see the Performance section below).

SmartThings is also available, with the Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR connecting toy our home network via Wi-Fi. Using the app I could control the advanced features, including toggling Hybrid precise cooling (using the Peltier element to maintain more stable temperatures) and AI precise cooling (learning usage patterns, so the fridge knows when to engage cooling).

The app will also ping notifications if something goes wrong, such as temperatures rapidly increasing in the fridge.

Performance

• Excellent temperature control
• Low running costs

To test out the Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR, I loaded it up with freezer blocks to simulate a full load of food, and added temperature sensors. I set the fridge to 4°C and the freezer to -18°C. With the automatic door opener fitted to simulate usage, I measured temperatures over a two week period.

I found that the fridge compartment had an average temperature of 3.07°C, which is 0.93°C colder than the set temperature. Looking at temperatures in different parts of this compartment, the top average 4.21°C, while the middle was 2.78°C and the bottom 2.21°C.

What that shows is that the top of the fridge, which is the warmest, is very close to the target temperature, so you can store your food on any shelf and have it well preserved.

Looking at temperature variation, I found that temperatures mostly varied from the average by +/-0.26°C. That’s absolutely incredible: anything below 1°C is a good result, and the closer to 0°C variation even better. This shows how good the AI Hybrid Cooling is.

Measuring the temperature in one of the drawers, I found the average was just 1.58°C, with temperatures barely fluctuating at +/-0.15°C. For fresh food that needs stability, the Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR is incredible.

Freezer temperatures were also very good, averaging -19.74°C (1.74°C colder than the target). The temperature measured at the top, middle and bottom were all very close, and temperatures fluctuated throughout the space by +/-0.45°C. Again, that’s an incredible result.

The Samsung Bespoke AI Series 8 RM70F67RDR is a D-rated fridge-freezer, which is better than most of this size, which are typically E-rated. Measuring power consumption I estimated that this model would cost £40.30 a year to run (assuming 24.5p per kWh), which breaks down to a running cost of 6p per litre.

To put that into context, that’s the same running cost per litre as the smaller, A-rated Liebherr CBNsda 575i.

Should you buy it?