Sounds OK except for regions (like California) where there is a known drought and water shortages.

I also cannot imagine the amount of energy needed to do a self defrost is that much greater than the energy used on old non-self-defrost fridges. One can easily determine this by checking the storage capacity of a modern fridge and comparing the estimated energy use against that of and old non-self-defrost fridge of similar capacity.

Then there is the consideration of the energy needed to defrost an older fridge: energy used to boil water, open the fridge to insert a pan of such hot water into the freezer compartment, and the energy needed to bring the fridge back down to operating temp once the frost has dropped off the freezer compartment.

For a while beginning in the late '70s my sister had a pink behemoth TOL 1961 Coldspot bottom mount fridge that she and her then-husband bought from a private party who advised that it just got a little ice build-up below the evaporator on the rear wall of the freezer section.  Well, it was more like the fridge developed a glacier back there that tried to slowly make its way out into the kitchen.  This was due to a failed heating element that no longer warmed recessed channels in the freezer floor to route melted frost to the drain.

The fridge still maintained proper temperature, but I don't know about the freezer.  They ended up calling Sears to repair it.  A retrofit heated trough was installed and the problem was resolved.  It was worth it since they had only paid $100 for the fridge.  It was beautiful, full-featured and quiet, but due to its size and weight it was left behind in the mid '80s when the house was sold. 

Paul, you must be psychic. 

My sister's place had an in-law unit on the basement level.  After she and her husband split up, she moved into that space and rented out the main house upstairs.  The pink fridge was wrestled down the steps and had to make a sharp right turn at the bottom.  I'm glad I had no part of that.  Doing it in reverse would have been much more difficult, and the in-law unit's other exterior ingress/egress route was too tight for the fridge, which is why it was left behind.

Re:  the pros and cons of manual defrosting, I think the two-door GE Combinations with single cold control required less recovery time than other makes since the fresh food section door could remain closed while the separate freezer was defrosted and water ran down the drain system to the pan behind the front grille.  Once the defrosting was done, and since the cold control operated off of the fresh food section's conditions, it didn't require much recovery time.  The freezer caught up quickly enough, particularly when re-stocked with still-frozen contents.

I would hazard a guess that before automatic defrost fridges hit the market, most home refrigerators were manual defrost. Until now I'd never heard of a the setup that Ralph described. I'm assuming it didn't have a heating element in the freezer compartment to initiate the defrost process. It sounds like a compromise/interim design between auto defrost and manual defrost. Is that correct?

Rich, yes -- GE marketed the two-door Combination series with the claim of no defrosting ever, but they were only talking about the separate fresh food section (see bullet point #4 in the '57 promo below).  This applied to all Combinations until Frost Guard was introduced in 1959 (which used hot gas to defrost the freezer), but GE was still producing the manual defrost types well into the 1960s. 

Having enjoyed the Combination experience for several years with my '57 top mount model, I can attest that the defrosting process was far less work than it was with older style refrigerators like your single door GE.  I used my own "Red-E-Defrost" heater to speed up the process because no, the Combinations didn't have an on-board heater from 1948 through 1958.

OK, Ralph, thanks.

But I'm still puzzled.

Wouldn't most frost be in the freezer section? And far less frost in the refrigerator section?

Glad GE eventually figured it out.

For sure Rich.  The frost in the fresh food section was just a light glaze on the ceiling mounted serpentine evaporator coil.  The cold control wouldn't activate the compressor until the evaporator coil had remained at a high enough temperature long enough for the frost to melt away and drain into a trough. 

I think the operating temperature of the coil was around -13 F.  After the compressor cycled off, the coil temp only needed to hit a few degrees above freezing to defrost, and for only a few minutes.

Well, maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get the point of a refrigerator that only defrosts the section that has the least amount of frost, and leaves the section that will get the most frost encrusted with a layer of ice.

Or maybe I'm missing something?

Seems to me we had a bottom freezer fridge in New England back in '62-63 that my mom wasn't too thrilled about. Then we moved to California and left it behind.

The two door refrigerators that most everybody made where you defrosted just the freezer were a huge breakthrough, the freezers accumulated frost relatively slowly you could often go a full year without defrosting them even in regular kitchen use. Having the freezer completely separate fteezer also gave you a real 0° freezer that you could keep food in long-term.

Far more moisture escapes from the refrigerator section and turns into frost in the typical refrigerator, the two door combination refrigerators only needed about one 1/4 to 1/10th the amount of defrosting as an old-fashioned manual defrost one with the freezer chest in the top.

Companies like admiral made both fully frost free refrigerator freezers and ones where you still had to defrost the freezer because fully frost free ones not only cost a lot more to build but they cost a lot more to run many people didn’t want to pay the extra money.

Even back in the 60s people complained of adding $6 to $10 a month to their electric bill when they got one of these huge fully frost free refrigerators, they also didn’t like how frequently they ran and how much heat they put off in the kitchen.

John L