The Buyer’s Best Friend : You name it--TVs, cars, even toilets--and Consumer Reports will test it. After all, whatis a shopper’s bible for?

It’s Monday morning and Tara Casaregola and Ruth Greenberg are preparing hamburgers, shaping the meat into uniform patties and lining them up on a broiler rack precisely two inches apart.

“We’re applying basic scientific methodology here,” Casaregola says, closing the oven door. “They’re the same thickness and they’ll be on broil for exactly 11 minutes.”

Beyond them in the immense kitchen 19 more ovens await. “We’ll test each oven for broiling hamburgers well done,” Casaregola says. They will also test each range for baking, frying, melting capacity, self-cleaning and other performance features.

The tedious process will take months, and when the results are compiled and reported, they will influence the way millions of Americans buy a new stove.

Casaregola is an appliance project leader for Consumer Reports magazine. On this typical day, other project leaders are also at work up and down the halls, measuring, weighing, flushing, inflating, heating, freezing, pushing, pulling, smashing and bending new products to see if they live up to their billing.

“We’re the only one that tests ‘em and breaks ‘em,” jokes Jeffrey Asher, director of technical operations for the laboratories.

The results will be exactingly documented in the monthly magazine published by Consumers Union. The magazine’s objective information has guided shoppers through the advertising hype of the American marketplace for almost 60 years.

Since the watchdog publication appeared in 1936 with the stated goal of “providing technical guidance for consumers,” its scientists have conducted comparison tests on thousands of products, from air conditioners and refrigerators to condoms and fingernail polish. Its tests routinely take from three to six months and have run as long as a year.

Teams of shoppers in unmarked vans buy all the test products in retail stores, paying cash and lugging the items to the labs. Nothing is delivered; that might be a tip-off to the merchants. (Most of the tested products are eventually sold at an annual employee auction.)

“It’s a long, arduous process,” says spokeswoman Rana Arons. “The scientific reports might be 100 pages long, then they get compressed down to the essence for the magazine. They are checked and rechecked. They are read by the editors, by the library, by the scientists. Our credibility is one of our most important qualities.”

As a result, Consumer Reports is required homework for millions of shoppers. Its readers can head out to buy a toaster oven knowing which models needed two cycles for the bagel, burned the English muffin or wouldn’t hold the fourth slice of bread. They know which brands are easier to clean and have automatic timers, adjustable racks and easy-to-remove crumb trays. They know the dimensions and price range and warranty length of all the major models.

Consumer Reports has done the work for them. And in the value-conscious ‘90s, that’s a big plus. In the last three years the magazine’s circulation has shot up from 3.7 million to 5 million, overtaking any number of hipper, sleeker periodicals.

The headquarters is a two-story gray cement building surrounded by wooded hills in Yonkers, just up the Hudson River from New York City. The sunny, spacious building houses 100,000 square feet of testing space, along with editorial offices for the magazine and offices for Consumers Union.

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The notion of lining up 20 dishwashers or 36 vacuum cleaners or 16 low-flow toilets and subjecting them all to the same rigorous workout is unusual, Asher says.

“Normally all a manufacturer can do is test their own models. Very seldom do they get to test others, and certainly not others in the extensive amounts of comparative testing we do.”

The magazine’s 145 testers are scientists, but they are also communicators, accustomed to explaining their procedures to visitors.

“We do this project every couple of years,” says Bernard Deitrick, director in the bustling dishwasher lab.

Long tables are covered with dirty dishes. It looks like the aftermath of a banquet, except that the dishes are dirtied exactly alike. Rows of cereal bowls have a dab of milk, three cornflakes and a fourth cornflake stuck in a spoon. Rows of plates are being spread with exactly one teaspoon of chili over exactly one quarter of the plate.

“We put on the food, let it dry a bit and lightly scrape it,” Deitrick says. “We try to challenge the machine, not beat it. We know that certain things won’t come off without scrubbing.”

The room filled with new dishwashers waiting for their identical loads is lined with oversized pipes for the huge amounts of water and power needed. “Our utility bills are very high,” Deitrick notes.

The machines were installed in August and testing will wind up in December. Then Deitrick will write the technical report and send it to the editorial department, probably for the May issue. “We’re trying to speed the process up,” he says.

A chemical engineer with degrees from MIT and Cornell, he was writing industrial technical reports when he saw an ad for the Consumer Reports job.

“I thought it would be fun, and it is,” he says. “In industry, a project might take up to 10 years and your report is read by five people. Here we work hard, finish a project and 15 million people may read it.

“Also, my mother understands what I do now, which is a big plus.”

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Although the testing is scientific work, it also demands a pinch of whimsy. A visitor wandering through the labs will confront everything from sophisticated computers to the downright wacky.

A room filled with low-flow toilets is dominated by a large test platform where a toilet is attached to a plastic pipe for the drain line carry tests. Senior project leader Jim Nanni is flushing sponges of various sizes and shapes to measure how far downstream they are carried.

“This is our first test of low-flow toilets, which are relatively new,” he says. “We’re finding a significant difference among the worst, better and best.”

In vacuum cleaners, Jack Toback carefully sprinkles a 100-gram mixture of sand and talcum powder over a stretch of carpet and rolls a weight over it--20 strokes.

“You get expert at all kinds of strange things here,” he says. “We vacuum it eight times forward and eight times backward, then weigh the carpet and weigh the vacuum cleaner to see how much of the 100 grams got picked up. We measure performance by how much dirt is picked up. You go to the store and they talk about ‘amps.’ Nobody understands that.”

Angelo Mannino, senior project leader in the washing-machine lab, opens a brown cardboard box filled with tidy packages of identical soiled cloth squares. Each square is scanned into a machine that reads the degree of whiteness before and after the wash. “We measure how well each machine cleans,” he says.

Water and electricity for each wash are controlled by computers. “We’ve been working on this for almost seven months and are wrapping up the numbers now,” he says. It’s his 11th project for the magazine; his repertoire includes barbecue grills, electric skillets and cooktops. He’s an electrical engineer, but likes cooking so much he’s taking courses at an epicurean center.

The inventive testers have created all sorts of environments. A paint lab simulates daylight and indoor and outdoor lighting. Loudspeakers are tested in a chamber made echo-free by fiberglass wedges on every surface. Luggage gets picked up and dropped by a motorized rack with chains for arms. In another test, suitcases are filled with eggs and dumped into a huge metal tumbler for tossing. If the eggs don’t break, the suitcase passes the strength test.

Many of the homespun devices have been devised out of necessity, Arons says. “Sometimes industry copies things from us.”

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With an estimated 25,000 products to choose from, the magazine’s first challenge is deciding what to test in the sea of consumer goods, Asher says. “It feels totally overwhelming sometimes.”

The decision is made by an operating committee that includes all divisions of Consumers Union, and relies heavily on letters and calls from readers. “Our readers pay our bills,” Asher says, “and we have to focus on what is important to them. This is focused research, not a master’s thesis.

“We test only 66 whole projects a year for the magazine’s main stories and the mix is important. We also do once-overs (short summaries) for about 40 small products and report those in the magazine’s once-over page or sidebars.”

Major home appliances are tested every year because they are big-ticket items that require careful shopping. Cars also are tested regularly at another location--a track in Haddam, Conn. It is estimated that one in five Americans uses Consumer Reports in selecting a car.

“People know they can count on us, especially when they are making a big purchase, so they save the magazine, or get the buying guide or go to the library,” Asher says.

The magazines are packed with information in graphic ratings charts, tables and photos and in breezy editorial essays. A recent survey of coffee makers, packaged with an overview of the research on coffee and health, included this observation: “Caffeine is a little like a criminal suspect who’s repeatedly pulled in for questioning, with the evidence always too thin to indict--but usually substantial enough to justify continued surveillance.”

Monthly features also include updates on product recalls, a roundup of dubious ads, reader votes on movies and videos, and a guide to money.

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Because of the magazine’s clout, the test results are serious business, and items have been recalled or modified after a critical Consumer Reports review. (In one of the highest-profile cases, a 1988 report that the Suzuki Samurai tended to flip over resulted in the eventual demise of the Samurai.) Manufacturers who object to an unfavorable rating--and many do--are often invited to the labs to see for themselves.

“In more than 50 years we’ve rarely been sued, and never successfully,” Arons says.

The magazine doesn’t sell advertising and accepts no free samples. The annual budget of $110 million, which includes $17 million-plus for the lab products and testing, comes from subscriptions to Consumer Reports and other Consumers Union publications.

The organization runs a communications empire, publishing not only Consumer Reports but also Zillions, a children’s consumer magazine, and travel and health newsletters. It has a television arm with syndicated services and two syndicated newspaper columns. It also can be found in cyberspace, with Consumer Reports information available on CompuService, American Online and Prodigy.

To underscore its integrity, Consumers Union won’t allow manufacturers to use favorable ratings for promotional purposes.

“Our information is valuable because it is based on terrific testing and research and also because it is absolutely independent,” says Rhoda H. Karpatkin, president of Consumers Union. “This puts us in the enviable position of being beholden to no one, except our readers.”

This is particularly important in today’s market, she adds, because “We are absolutely swimming in hype. There are more products than ever fighting for market share and more ways to advertise and promote them.”

Not only is the marketplace more complicated today, so are the publications claiming to offer consumer advice, she notes. “People feel there is hardly anyone they can trust anymore.”

But readers trust Consumer Reports. When Consumers Union moved into its present building, built in 1991, readers had contributed $17 million (much of it in donations of $25) toward the $40-million cost.

Says Karpatkin: “When people ask if consumers really need consumer information, want to support it and recognize the importance of having an advocate working on their behalf, I tell them to look at this building.

“This answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ ”