I went with 12" on my refrigerator/freezer, any smaller I think would look and feel too small.

That's the one thing I'm not paneling is the regular size refrigerator. So I was wondering if I could get away with 8" for the other appliances I listed above?

I'm sure you could "get away with it", but I still think 12" scales and feels better with all appliances, (plus you can hang dish towels on them;)
There really is no right or wrong, but I will agree the 5" would be silly looking as well as not practical...

This post was edited by ctycdm on Tue, Oct 21, 14 at 23:46

Don't know if this helps, but we used 8" handles on most of our cabs/drawers, one 5" handle on the one small (12" wide) drawer, and 12" handles on our paneled DW, trash can cab (which is accessed via foot pedal), and the wide (short in height) cab over the fridge. We felt it best to use a more substantial size/width handle in those three spots.

I just installed Top Knobs' 6.75" pulls on my 24" under counter refrig drawers last week and think the scale is perfect. I mocked up various pull sizes in advance using tinfoil and it was extremely helpful in selecting pull sizes. I didn't panel my dw so can't help on that one.

For some reason the only appliance that I'm questioning with the 12" pull is the 24" refrigerator drawers. I'm not sure how that will look? Being that is half the size of the drawer.