When we upgraded our appliances, the "smart" or "wifi-enabled" ones were specifically avoided like the plague. "Dumb" appliances - especially fridges, for some reason - are becoming hard to come by, but they do exist. Electrolux, KitchenAid, even LG all make some no-frills models that can save both money and frustration. Hopefully those companies continue serving the "luddite techie" market.
Yes, I agree. I'm not a luddite per se - heck, I make a living out of making stuff talk to one another on a network. But I don't get the appeal, from a customer standpoint, of having all physical objects talk to you or to the Internet. Like, why?
I get it when it comes to alarm systems. Being able to get a notification when someone breaks in is nice, because the alarm system is mostly doing its job when you're not at home. It makes sense.
What it does not make sense, in my humble opinion, is pretty much everything else. Why do I need voice activated lights, outside of a cool party trick ("hey, I can turn the lights on with my voice")? Why should a vacuum cleaner, even if a robot one, be able to upload a picture of a woman on the toilet to the Internet (which has actually happened)? Why should the fridge talk to you?
Ironically, this kind of stuff might become less and less appealing with remote working. If you're at home anyway, can't you just stand up and look at the fridge or turn that light on?
Even appliances that aren't internet connected are going down this terrible UX path.
My old washing machine had nobs (dials) you turn. You put the clothes and soap in, close the door and press the button. My preference of type of wash and water temperature were all "saved" by the nob position.
My current washing machine, nob is type of wash, capacitive touch buttons for everything else. Keeping the nob "on" keeps the digital display on and consuming power. And the wash options like temperature, extra rinse etc are all controlled digitally with no memory. Want 60 degrees water? Press the water temperature button 8 times, each with a delay of about 3/4 of a second for it to register before a press works again. It's utterly terrible.
I like solid-state controls for my laundry and dishwashing machines. The old mechanical gear-and-cam type of controls were troublesome in my experience.
However I agree on the complexity. I deliberately buy appliance with as few optoins as possible. My dishwasher has two cycles: normal or heavy-duty, and one more option for heat or air dry. It has a single button to start/stop. If you just load it and press start, it runs the last cycle chosen.
My washer and dryer (LG) have some more options but if you just load them and press Start they run the "normal" cycle which is what I want 90% of the time. Simple.
Do not want internet-connected appliances with apps and excessive features.
I'll never again have a water line connected to my refrigerator. They eventually leak and in one case did significant damage to the floor before I noticed. For cold water, keep a pitcher in the fridge. For ice, use ice trays. Simple and they always work.
From my experience, the somewhat clear plastic tubing that is often used is subject to becoming brittle and crack over time. I replaced mine with copper. Haven't had any problem since with it.
Also you can't operate e.g. a dishwasher with kitchen gloves now, as those silly touchscreens won't cooperate. Few brands know how to keep it simple. Even Miele and Liebherr are falling into these absurd trends.
Can't believe that none of these designers thought that one might want to use a kitchen appliance with gloves on before slapping capacitive touch on everything...
It's market efficiency at work: appliances are well past the point of being good enough, they're now being optimized to the point of being as shit as they can be without becoming unsellable.
Capacitive touch buttons became cheaper than mechanical buttons. That's why they're suddenly on everything now.
Yes, but we are talking about saving cents on hundreds of dollars here. We really need to come up with better ways to make companies bear the cost of their shitty cost cutting measures.
> Why do I need voice activated lights, outside of a cool party trick ("hey, I can turn the lights on with my voice")?
It's actually very convenient :) I hated when I forgot to turn some light off and had to get out of bed just to flip it. And you don't need Internet for that, just a local hub with voice recognition (though most off the shelf stuff does everything it can for you to go with Google/Apple systems, which do need to be connected all the time - besides requiring you to be logged in at all times for no benefit to you, obviously just so they can either sell your data or to ensure you're properly locked in and can deny you service if you somehow get out of line).
My heat pump does require Internet, though. Apparently the firmware must self-update continuously and you can probably be denied warranty if you don't let it do so. But at least there are genuine use cases: it can monitor the electricity prices with 1-day in advance, so it can "plan" the best time to power up and down to save electricity (at least they say it does it)... and it can control the temperature better as the temperature outside goes up and down, knowing it beforehand via weather forecasts. But of course, to actually control the machine via the app requires a paid feature :D no thanks.
This was what made me understand the voice-activated stuff too. I hadn’t appreciated, until hanging around with more people enduring the indignities of aging, how even trivial physical tasks become ordeals.
The lights make some sense in that you may not want to walk to another corner of your house, or up and down stairs to be able to turn them on or off. Similar functions, like smart locks or blinds or ovens also let you have some peace of mind to make sure you’ve got everything in the On/Off state you need it to be in.
Though personally I think we’re barking up the wrong tree by trying to smarten up every appliance. The objective of having remote control/sensing of all your stuff would be better achieved by having a single robot “butler” that can check on state and interface with everything, but the appliances themselves should be simple and easily controllable. As long as there’s a universal communications standard for all devices to be able to communicate with the “butler” the mechanical interfacing could basically be designed in as accessibility features. That way the software and smart capabilities are all in one package that can be upgraded or modified instead of scattered across a bunch of individual things that are expensive to replace or repair.
I’m basically imagining a drone that runs around the house along a rail track on the ceiling and has a little dongle it can plug into devices to control them like Star Wars droids. Bonus points if the method of control is purely mechanical without needing much computing power in the appliance at all.
The reason this will never happen, of course, is obvious. You’ll never get everyone to retrofit their houses for a robo-rail.
Perhaps instead of rails you could go for a flying quadcopter-drone with some sort of manipulator arm. If it was light it could even land and charge from the same ports it uses to communicate with appliances.
Of course if any big FAANG-company does this expect it to be beaming everything it sees straight up to the cloud. Amazon already tried this with their Ring security drone.
The issues with drones is it takes energy to stay aloft and you’ll be introducing weight limits. It’ll also become a target for pet owners. Cats, in particular, will swat them down.
I control my lights with my voice practically all the time. It’s easily my primary mode of changing the state of my lights. Whenever I travel it only takes an hour tops after entering a hotel for me to get annoyed by whatever command I’ve yelled out being met with silence.
I say this because maybe it goes to show that different people are different. Maybe someone gets use out of the silly camera that shows them the inside of the fridge. It sounds ridiculous to me, but evidently my lights sound ridiculous to you.
Yes, but how often do you experience power outages or other things that lead to weird temperature changes? I think in the last 15 years it only happened to me once.
And how often does a fridge door open on its own? Most people don't need other people (or things) to remind them that they should tie their shoes before getting out. If you don't need that, I assume you know you should close the fridge door.
In Ukraine last year we had scheduled blackouts. Let me tell you about the joy of waking up every other night to reset temperature alarm of the fridge. It could not be disabled, and it would beep for hours. My neighbors were not pleased when I was not at home for a week.
And that cheap beeping sound of every appliance is just so obnoxious. You want to wash laundry overnight to lessen load on electricity generation during blackouts? It would beep for 30 minutes when it is done. No way to disable it but to wake up and turn the button.
When everyone does it, the whole apartment complex is filled with beeping sounds all night.
Yes, but how often do you experience power outages … I think in the last
15 years it only happened to me once.
You must not live in Texas or California.
or other things that lead to weird temperature changes?
You're a lot more upbeat on current fridge reliability than I am. LG lost a class action suit regarding their junk "linear" compressors a few years ago, and despite multiple supposed revisions you can still find appliance repair folks badmouthing their current crop of linear compressors on youtube. To the best of my knowledge, my vile LG ex-fridge didn't have a linear compressor, but it did have a habit of icing up the evap coils until the fucking thing couldn't keep the temp down. LG sent a tech out twice, he couldn't figure it out. I got tired of throwing out food and tired of ice buildup hitting the fan and making an absolute cacophony in the middle of the night… so they finally bought it back.
I've seen some grumblings that the switch (in the US) to R600 is killing durability, but I'm not sure I buy that. If you dig through some of the service literature out there you'll see that companies across the board are also cheapening the sealed systems (e.g. aluminum replacing copper).
you know you should close the fridge door.
A common complaint about my current fridge is that the doors do not close on their own. The detent is wicked strong. I suspect you'd have to tilt it back to an uncomfortable degree to overcome it. E.g. the door probably wouldn't stay open at all on its own.
Its not just their linear compressors, its the fact that they use very thin aluminum tubing on the high side, and apparently have had assembly issues where weld material has splattered on the tubes, which after a bit of thermal cycling (or maybe its just galvanic corrosion) they start leaking.
I to had a LG refrigerator declared "unfixable" and bought back by LG, but I actually decided they were idiots and fixed it myself after having not only their local repair people fail to fix it, but the "expert" from LG's regional center come out and diagnose it. (It should be noted that he diagnosed the condenser, the only part not already replaced at that point, and that failed to fix it so, they declared it unfixable).
Turns out in my case, the leak was in the yoder loop, a modern trick for increasing the efficiency of a refrigerator by running a high pressure refrigerant line around the doors to avoid needing electric defrost loops (what pretty much every fridge made pre ~2005 or so has).
And since the yoder loop is embedded in the spray foam insulation between the exterior and interior of the fridge is is largely unrepairable because the insulation would have to be destroyed and somehow partially refilled, which wouldn't be possible without adding a bunch of access holes/etc to the exterior.
So, I bypassed it, as a "research project" before buying another fridge, something the LG folks told me wouldn't work, and the tech refused to do. Which funny enough i'm an EPA certified small appliance repair tech (don't ask! lol) so, it apparently is just up my alley. And guess what 5 years later is still going. I've had to manually defrost the ice maker fan once in that timeframe and it does tend to get some condensation build up on the bottom of the french doors, but nothing that wipeing it away every few days doens't solve.
As an additional bit of fun, this refrigerator has a steel condenser and both aluminum as well as copper tubing/fittings.
Yeah I had a top freezer model, something that should be dead nuts simple and yet everything was still electronically controlled. That means you've got all sorts of onboard diagnostics. Even so the LG tech couldn't figure out the problem. In general though I can totally get why someone employed by the manufacturer wouldn't want to go off script. Too much liability.
One of many problems with LG is that they seem to have a rotating cast of metrics driven clowns running LG America. Junking a fridge is almost certainly more cost effective than spending the time to fix it, train their techs in depth, and get their logistics in order. The tech that came out had previously worked for GE and had worse things to say about their brand of chaos.
Funny enough the Whirlpool that replaced it did have exposed insulation (and gobs of epoxy everywhere). It would've been worse than the LG, except it actually kept things cool.
The yoder loop on a fridge is designed to prevent condensation near the door seals. Depending on your climate you may be able to get away without one.
When I'm talking about the heater on mine not working, I'm talking about the heater for the evaporator. Without a working heater I'd get enough ice built up on the evaporator within a week to cause problems with the evaporator fan. If the fan doesn't work you're not gonna get much in the way of cool air into the fridge or freezer compartments.
Pretty much everything else could be done differently:
- Calling in a warranty claim involved going through a troubleshooting script that wanted me to do things that my fridge could not do. LG needs to get their documentation in order so that their call center staff can at least approach being useful.
- LG punted me to an authorized service center first thing. I'm in the Bay Area which should, IMO, be a large enough market to have sufficient LG direct staff. LG needs to hire more repair staff.
- The third party ignored me for a few weeks and then I started making noise in LG's general direction. LG probably needs to up their warranty rates to entice third parties to actually service these calls.
- LG finally sent one of their techs out. He called me, I described the symptoms and the temperature graphs to give him an idea of what's going on. He finally admitted that he didn't have ANY parts for this fridge on his truck. So I told him to order what he thought needed. That took about two weeks. On his first visit he identified more stuff he wanted to replace so that took another few days because the west coast distribution center didn't have the parts and he missed the cutoff for the east coast center. LG needs to get their American logistics in order.
- LG pushed really hard to get the tech out here ASAP even though he had some idea as to what was wrong and was in no position to fix anything. LG ought to stop relying so heavily on useless metrics.
It's been a long enough time I don't remember the precise symptoms and I've no idea what actually failed beyond a thermistor so it's impossible to suggest engineering improvements. However I think LG ought to work on training their own techs to get their diagnostic skills up to snuff.
Although I'm pretty sure it's not one of LG's horrific linear compressors, I suspect the compressor failed or there was a refrigerant leak. Unlike the above poster I've working knowledge of automotive A/C not small appliances. In a car the refrigerant will carry the lubricant, so a refrigerant leak can indeed cause problems as the compressor eventually runs dry. For all I know the fridge's compressor uses an oil free design and failed for other reasons. I think the tech checked temperatures at the condenser and was happy with that – but remember unlike on a car refrigerators have no ports to check pressures. That's crucial in diagnosing problems, so techs are kinda flying blind here.
If the problem was with the sealed system then the solution is: LG needs to engineer their fridges properly. Fixing the sealed system in the field is something you can do (except for the yoder loop in the insulation) but it takes time and skill, things that most techs don't have. Basically those repairs won't last. Working with aluminum (welding, brazing, soldering) is tough, although I think LG is moving to using fancy compression fittings for repairs.
If it's basically anything else they need to again work on training their techs to diagnose these things properly.
My experience went on for ~6 months of soap opera, similar to what you're describing, where an authorized service provider would "fix" it, and then it would stop cooling within a week or two. Then LG, or the authorized center, would diagnose some other thing that hadn't been replaced. No actual leaks were ever found, which was the problem after they replaced the compressor (the first thing they replaced, but it was on the 2nd trip), and now they had access points to check the pressure.
With the bonus that in our particular case, we were paying for the "labor" and getting the parts under warranty, which means that in the end I paid ~$1000 for repairs and LG claimed to have provided ~$1200 worth of parts (which is bullshit because an aluminum evaporator coil doesn't cost $400 unless it has a 20x retail markup). So, when they sent a check, it covered our sunk costs. But I had a fridge with a brand new compressor, evaporator, and condenser, as well as an upgraded control board/etc. This is part of the reason I took a crack and just ran it without the Yoder loop.
So, a couple of points: some other companies fix yoder loop leaks by bypassing them and feeding factory-provided heating coils through the now vacant line.
Also, the LG parts all had copper brazing points, so the tech never had to work with aluminum/steel directly.
Finally, I wonder, after your initial comment, if there was just a problem with the refrigerant charge, which was causing your fan to ice over as a byproduct because it was slightly under/overcharged from the factory.
This is such a mixed blessing. It's great for diagnostic work, but it's also one more place for things to leak over time. Cars can deal with leaks (and are expected to leak by design) but they've also got a couple pounds of refrigerant if we're talking R134a. A fridge has like 40 grams (which makes the explosion hazard stickers on the R600a fridges kinda funny). Were it me, I'd be very wary of accepting sealed system work under warranty.
Also, the LG parts all had copper brazing points, so the tech never
had to work with aluminum/steel directly.
That's interesting. I wonder how the mix of metals bodes for longevity.
Finally, I wonder, after your initial comment, if there was just a
problem with the refrigerant charge, which was causing your fan to
ice over as a byproduct because it was slightly under/overcharged
from the factory.
To be clear the whole evap was icing over. But the fan is, by necessity, quite close. I'm inclined to think it was filled properly at the factory because overall the build quality was leaps and bounds ahead of Whirlpool (and Frigidaire). It wouldn't take much to convince me that there was some sort of electronic component failure as one thermistor was already out of spec.
With the LG I was a renter, so I was willing to push things along with LG and do as much diagnostic work as possible. But at the end of the day I didn't really want to dig into fixing anything myself because the fridge simply wasn't mine. I also didn't have room for a second "project" fridge. The landlady wasn't out anything because it was covered under the extended warranty (my initial call was a year + 1 day after the purchase) and LG bought it back for full retail price.
They never actually diagnosed it, I did. They just kept replacing things until they decided they couldn't actually fix it and sent a check. At no point did LG or the authorized center actually find a leak, or suggest that it might be leaking from the yoder loop. They would come out with their leak detection equipment (both sniffers and after the dryer replacement, a UV light to detect the dye) fail to find a leak, and just replace the next thing on the list. Which usually was a three trip process for each item they replaced with a few days/week or so while they ordered the part, and queued the work detail.
I had the yoder loop conversation with the tech on the last call when they came out to verify it was still broken/unfixable, and he basically said bypassing it wasn't possible, which is odd since other companies can.
Probably a tiny handful of times? And would it have been useful? Yes of course it's useful to get a warning when you're not at home or upstairs in bed. I didn't say it was a life changing critical feature, I said "handy".
We had a freezer door pop open overnight once... it was because one of the drawers wasn't quite shut properly, all was good for hours after closing it and then suddenly it popped open when we were in bed and we came down to the food at the front of the drawers defrosted.
When you use something day in day out for 40+ years you occasionally have an accidental bad interaction. Sometimes you press the wrong button on the TV remote, sometimes one of the drawers in the freezer is further forward by half an inch on one side and you didn't notice, it happens.
Most people, especially on HN, don't need to be reminded to think critically about how real world interactions actually might occur before posting poorly thought out responses for the sake of evangelically pushing a point, but here we are
If dealing with an ugly path means streaming data all the time to the Internet and potentially decreasing the reliability of the whole thing, just because once every 5 or 10 years stuff defrosts...
No, it's for when the kids leave the door open or just don't close it properly - which is VERY frequent. The door alarm goes off once per week here, at least.
Kids can know to close the door, intend to close the door, but still fail to realize they didn't close the door. They're kids, it happens. And its a simple feature that can help realize the door is still open. It's not that deep..
My dog is my alarm for when the kid starts drawing on the walls or breaks something. He barks to let me know. It’s very convenient and I’m glad to have him. If it was practical to make a computer to do this I’m sure people would find it useful.
I'd say a temperature alarm - if I happen to feel I need one - should be a physically separate little thing. With it's own programmable temperature range. Usually it's in the fridge. But during a cold spell, I can adjust and move it to a spot where I'm worried the pipes might freeze. Or turn it into a "is the A/C working?" watchdog during a heat wave. Or, I can buy several to cover all those. But they're all one make & model, so I don't have to install/learn/use 5 different crappy apps for 'em.
And that way the the fridge can't die...and quietly take its built-in alarm with it.
I said it was handy not something I would go out of my way to get... the fridge has it so it's useful. I don't understand why so many people on here are so offended by a useful feature that from most people's perspective is just a feature the fridge has rather than one they shopped for.
I personally am not offended by a feature. I wouldn't march on the streets to denounce this or anything like that.
What I am saying (though I cannot speak for anyone) is that I, on the contrary, would go out of my way to not get, not because I have thin foil hat or whatever, but because the reliability and privacy concerns this kind of thing carries far outweigh (in my scale) the benefit of having something that will come in useful once in a decade.
Note that things like that have already happened.
When an AWS region went down, things like doorbells and lights stopped working properly (https://financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/pitfalls-...). Which, if you think about it, is ridiculous. I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature.
And when it comes to privacy, Roomba employees posted on Facebook picture of a woman on the toilet, a picture that was taken by the Roomba itself while cleaning (https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...). Now, you might say that the Roomba algorithm has to train a lot to be able to work properly, but why take pictures? And why upload them to the Internet?
Of course everyone makes their own judgement calls. I'm not offended if anyone gets smart fridges or voice activated lights.
> I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature.
It appears there's a misunderstanding here. When smart lightbulbs lose internet connection, they still function as regular lightbulbs.
In such cases, you simply revert to the traditional method of turning the light switch on and off manually, instead of using voice commands or an app.
> It appears there's a misunderstanding here. When smart lightbulbs lose internet connection, they still function as regular lightbulbs.
That's a better way to install things, but it's not the only way that installation is done, and it's still excessive to need the internet for what could easily be a purely local operation. For device classes where "on/off" has historically been attached to the device itself (washer, stove, ...), it's more common than in the lightbulb case for the internet connection to be mandatory.
Pushing closer to tin-foil hat territory, when your lights can be controlled over the internet by servers you don't own, that operator can do nearly whatever they'd like. A common pattern in other industries (ocean navigation apps, OB2 monitors, ...) is to require a server for no good reason, sell a device at full market value, and then later extort the customer into some sort of subscription/data-leak to continue using their own devices. It's common for the remote server to just shut down (startup goes out of business, manufacturer decides it'd be nice if you bought a new device, ...). Less likely but worse if it happened, the server operator _could_ trigger epilectic seizures or whatever.
> That's a better way to install things, but it's not the only way that installation is done
It’s by far the most common. Most people just buy Hue lightbulbs and an hub to use with their existing home setup, which involves physical light switches still being present.
> Pushing closer to tin-foil hat territory…
For lights specifically: If this is a threat model that worries you, it’s quite easy to setup something like home assistant.io with zigbee lights.
Your repudiation appears to be about centralized services, not about “smart” devices as a general concept.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them.
Your position seems actually to be though that you can make smart devices acceptable if you're careful enough. That's probably true. However, I've seen the code people write, and I still personally wouldn't want a smart oven or any number of other such devices.
> Your repudiation appears to be about centralized services, not about “smart” devices as a general concept.
There's some truth to that. I focused on that point just because smart devices usually have a markup for their extra features, even though you don't really own the product, manufacturers have a habit of shutting them down, and most of the "smarts" are just figuring out how to generate extra ad revenue. That's not _all_ smart devices, but it's a lot of them. Contrast that with a centralized service like Overleaf, where I know I'm renting server time and disk space, and it's obvious what the threat models are (they can read anything sensitive, and I should probably make sure everything is backed up). Selling living room audio recordings on a device you paid more than fair market value for just feels a bit slimy, and I thought that might be a good touchpoint to illustrate what sorts of things can go wrong.
> The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them.
The person I responded to said:
> I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature.
That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).
> There's some truth to that.
That seems like a separate, if related, problem. There are plenty of smart devices that don't involve centralized services. Check out homeassistant.io. Plenty of devices where you own the product and they can't be shut down.
> That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).
What about my robo vacuum cleaner?
Also, you keep mentioning Hue as if this is what people buy. People with lots of disposable income buy Hue. Everyone else buys some cheap $noname Tuya crap (or get it installed by the contractors), and whether or not it works offline, they find out during their next Internet outage.
I'm not offended by you enjoying a feature, but I see that feature as a net negative. An R&D budget is more or less a zero sum situation. Money spent developing temperature sensors is money not spent on something else.
Fridge quality today is lousy enough (and warranties + return policies have all but evaporated) that spending money elsewhere would've been a big win. Even if we're not talking reliability, I had to replace a 20 year old fridge with split shelves only to find that this feature is now only available on more expensive, less efficient, less reliable bottom freezer units. Another modern fridge I've dealt with recently (Whirlpool) was just breathtakingly poorly built. It worked, but imagine if Whirlopool had sunk money into QA instead of gizmos.
Presumably your built-in temp sensors are WiFi or bluetooth. What are the chances that's gonna get updated when the next WiFi standard starts to become more common? Will it support the next version of WPA? What happens when the power goes out?
When I had to diagnose a dying LG fridge, I got some cheapie ($20ish) RF temp probes. They're battery powered, the included receiver can set an alarm, and a cheapie software defined radio kit can decode the signals on Linux. I run rechargeable NiCad batteries in them and have moved them from the LG to a couple fridges since. Hands down a way better (and more robust) experience than anything a fridge manufacturer could dream up.
Door open alarms are comparatively much simpler and a good example of a feature with a much smaller inherent downside.
BTW, I'd also add that folks (not necessarily you) championing flashy features are forgetting just how dead nuts simple fridges used be. To the best of my knowledge my current fridge (Frigidaire / Electrolux) has a mechanical timer for the defrost cycle. The LG uses electronic controls to eek out a bit more efficiency. I know which one I'd rather replace.
It isn't zero sum. They could simply add the gizmos and keep the important bits the same as their refined, reliable 20 year old designs. What they're actually doing is actively spending engineering resources to enshittify what was already perfected to boost profit.
For better or for worse, no, they could not have kept the working bits the same. The US EPA has progressively tightened restrictions both on what refrigerants can be used and how much electricity can be used. Instead of focusing on making that reliable, they're focusing on making it cheap so they can add gizmos.
Besides, if you've got to replace a fridge every five years now that's a win for the appliance manufacturers. Although, really, who offers anything more than a 1 year warranty anymore? That should tell you how long these things are expected to last.
Yeah there are no such protections stateside. Consumer companies took one look at the pandemic and saw dollar signs. With big appliances you'll get a flat one year warranty pretty much across the board even with European brands like Bosch. Big box stores tightened up their return policies as well. You've now got 48 hours (down from a month or two prior) to return big appliances. Extended warranties with any purchase used to be a mainstay of American credit cards, and that's largely gone.
Is that 48 hours even if it's faulty? It's 30 days under law here to replace or refund (your choice) and within six months the retailer is still responsible for providing a repair or replacement (their choice).
I do wonder if that drives the higher prices we pay here though...?
I'm (thankfully) not intimately familiar with the details but, yes, 48 hours is all you get for a quick and easy return to the vendor. In California, where I am, there is a so-called "lemon law" for appliances and it places the burden on the manufacturer. I don't think it mandates any particular length for the warranty though it does have provisions requiring buy backs under certain conditions.
When LG bought my fridge back the original warranty had expired a day prior and things were being handled under the terms of the extended warranty my landlady bought.
True, and if you're stuck with a fridge that's hooked to the internet regardless...
OTOH, this item's context is "KISS, because the complex products are hot & steamy piles of failure modes, all eager to show themselves off". From that PoV, the alarm features kinda sound like yet more things to break down.
I really have no idea how to reply to this without sounding like an ass so apologies in advance.
Well yeah duh if the door was shut properly every time fridges wouldn't need door or temperature alarms at all (most have an audible one already). But it's called an alarm for a reason, sometimes shit goes wrong and it's handy to know before all the food has been at room temperature all day. We had a freezer door pop open overnight once, because one of the drawers wasn't quite shut properly... in 40+ years of interacting with a fridge/freezer, yes occasionally mistakes are made
I also have friends and family and at least one will be aware and be willing to go to the house if necessary when we are away (only happened once when our intruder alarm went off for no apparent reason) and my neighbours would also pop in if I was at work.
Seriously your response showed such a lack of thinking of real world situations and usage I can only assume you work for the Google UI team or something
I too really have no idea how to reply to this without sounding like an ass so apologies in advance.
Well, our parents, and for the younger, our grandparents too, and us, have managed to do fine for like 60+ years of using fridges without an fridge door alarm.
Fun fact: for an alarm for when you are away for days, and you want to know if the fridge power went off and back on in between, you can freeze a jar of water in your freezer, put a coin on top, and leave it there.
If you find the coin in the bottom of the jar at some point, the fridge power/temperature has been off for a while.
They did fine for many years without mobile phones, cars, aircraft and computers... your point is irrelevant. It's just a handy extra to have I really don't see why people find my phone pinging me if the door is left open so offensive :-D
>They did fine for many years without mobile phones, cars, aircraft and computers... your point is irrelevant.
Nah, rather it's the comparison that is off.
Without cars, for example, transportation was slow and constrainted, affecting commerce, work, and lots of other things. Whether good or bad (since there are negatives too) the introduction of the car was a huge change.
Network connected fridges? The incovenience they solve is so rare and small that most people don't give a damn about, not to mention the incovenience from their assorted crappy controls, the privacy issues, and other such factors, can be even higher and more constant.
Might as well compare the invention of fire with the Shake Weight.
And without open door alarms, food would sometimes get spoiled and cause waste.
Why are you fighting the guy over this feature? Everybody here is in agreement that network-connected fridges are not particularly useful but you're trying to make a point about open door alarms.
Today, we call such tricks "life hacks". For when the defaults don't work well enough, even if they probably should. This is indeed a cool life hack. But it kind of feels like something that should've been built into the goddamn fridge.
You make the perfect argument for a physical alarm. I agree, that makes perfect sense, and is a cheap addition that significantly improves quality of life.
Will you be woken up by a midnight phone notification that the fridge is open? I tend to sleep stuff like that.
Does a once in 40 years mistake justify carrying an app around that does god knows what else, and the extra expense and hassle of a fridge that might or might not spy on you?
Do we need to therefore instrument our stoves, ovens, baths and basins to insulate ourselves from the other common domestic nightmare scenarios?
Also, you talk about intruder alarms? I thought we were talking about "smart" wifi connected fridges? That's a completely different scenario, and I fully agree with you. I pay a security company to monitor my alarm, and they visit my house within 5 minutes of the alarm triggering. But my fridge can stay as dumb as it gets, thanks. Literally the only thing its allowed to do is go brrr.
>Does a once in 40 years mistake justify carrying an app around that does god knows what else, and the extra expense and hassle of a fridge that might or might not spy on you?
>Do we need to therefore instrument our stoves, ovens, baths and basins to insulate ourselves from the other common domestic nightmare scenarios?
Exactly. There are a lot of things that could go wrong in daily life.
Let's say you are sleeping and one of the bed slats bends or breaks (this has actually happened to me). It's messy, especially because you wake up and putting the bed slat back is not easy. So what do you do? You either ignore the fact it may happen, or you say "well if it does happen, I guess I'll sleep on the couch or something". No one that I know, even among the most "smart home" obsessed people, has a bed which automatically beeps or sends a push notification if the slats are about to break.
Ok, now you wake up and nothing bad happened so far. You have breakfast (maybe you have a smart fridge which ensures you're not running out of yogurt or whatever). Then you go dress yourself. But then you realize your favorite shirt has a stain you didn't notice. Do you have a drawer that automatically beeps if your clothes have stains? Probably not. You either remember to watch closely your clothes and wash them properly, or say "whatever, I'll go with something else and I'll wash that later".
And so on. Life is full of minor inconveniences. That doesn't mean you should necessarily fill your life with sensors and beepers for every possible scenario. I might be getting too philosophical, but part of life is also becoming aware that things happen and you can't always be 100% safe in any possible scenario.
And since you can't always be 100% safe in any possible scenario, NFPA, airbags, seatbelts, and the EPA are just ludicrous extravagances conceived by fools who don't understand the inevitability of death?
There's a similar differencen in impact between picking up a second shirt in the morning and $100+ of food spoiling, but that didn't seem to bother you.
$100 of food spoiling in a decade vs picking up a second shirt maybe every month. They are different, but not that much.
And you're ignoring the first example about falling from your bed which, if things go wrong, can cause bone fractures which, especially in the US, could cost a lot more than $100.
My point about the alarm is that I have neighbours or friends who are willing to pop around and sort shit out.
People are taking this waaaayyyy out of context. I said it was handy. I didn't say it was a must feature or even one that make me choose a particular model or pay more for. But the fact my current fridge/freezer does it is a nice handy extra... I already have a billion things that spy on me, gather data so no I'm not particularly worried about what my fridge knows about me, the cameras all over the country I cannot avoid know far more already.
> Seriously your response showed such a lack of thinking of real world situations and usage I can only assume you work for the Google UI team or something
LOL'd as well, which caused my 1.5 year old to laugh; He gets it. Every time I use the Google Cloud Platform web UI I feel like someone is reaching through the monitor to slap me upside the head for not doing Infrastructure as Code.
My dumb LG freezer plays a “ping ping ping” tune whenever the door is not properly closed after a few seconds. No need to send a smartphone notification!
It's a lot more common that you didn't close it properly Just Now (and haven't gotten very far, and are maybe still in earshot) then the door spontaneously opening, especially with the slight negative pressure and magnetic gaskets.
(of course, where they're really useful is as office fridges, when the perpetrator wanders off oblivious but someone else gets driven mad by the just-barely-audible-beeping and hunts it down...)
Yes? But that still isn't a case for saying avoid it... I didn't say it was earth shattering life changing feature... if it has it, it's "handy". Not something that would make me buy it but useful if it does.
We did lose a fridge full of food once. On our way out for the weekend, my wife opened the freezer to grab ice to pack the cooler. She left the freezer door slightly ajar and grabbed the cooler and threw it in the car and we left.
We came home on Sunday to the fridge and freezer completely ambient temp and had to toss everything.
If we had a mobile alert on our phone, we could have turned around and closed it just fine, or asked our neighbor to.
Some people have family or close friends who have copies of our keys to deal with just such a scenario (or to water our plants when we're away on a longer holiday).
The number of times my fridge door has popped open (yes it has happened to me as well) is not worth making it a smart appliance that talks to the internet. It plays a physical alarm. That's it.
It's not the end of the world if some stuff inside goes bad. Again, not worth making it talk to the internet.
Have you ever been around kids? They have a complete lack of situational awareness that leads to things like not noticing they’ve not pushed the fridge door shut and sealed all the way after grabbing cheese and running back to play. I can’t tell you how many times the chime on our LG has let us know to push the door closed.
I admit I don't have kids, but AFAIK kids can do all kind of stuff, like putting crayons in the dishwasher or accidentally breaking things. You usually don't have sensors for all kinds of scenario (what if my kid breaks a glass? what if she starts drawing on the wall?). You either don't care and fix the thing later on, or you try to prevent that from happening, or a combination of the two. Sensors and notifications are not a reasonable solution to everything.
Probably easier and more efficient to just get a window/door sensor offered by all the home automation providers. It’ll integrate better into your home automation software of choice, be cheaper and much easier to replace.
>you could have GPT vision interpret it and offer you recipes or what is missing
What is missing and what I should buy are different things. If my fridge has yogurt, bacon and some hamburgers, you might say "well, you are missing eggs". Except maybe I don't want eggs. I may be even allergic. Or maybe I like eggs but I'm in some low-protein diet for whatever reason.
The goal of a fridge is not to have literally everything, is to store everything you think you need for some days.
As for recipes, yes, that's more creative, but I guess I would just actively Google that (or even use an old fashioned recipe book!) if I were looking for original recipes. Of course, you can also ChatGPT it, but the direct fridge -> ChatGPT interaction is a bit weird because maybe I don't want original recipes or maybe I'm going to eat out.
So a hypothetical (?) app that sends me notifications about what recipes ChatGPT suggests by looking at my fridge wouldn't be very appealing unless you're always looking for new recipes. If you're mostly cooking ordinary things, continuous "You could cook X" would count as spam, much like a lot of people skip (or try to skip) ads on Youtube and ignore random "buy this at 70% discount" emails. And if you're that passionate about new recipes I guess you're probably interested in cooking and don't need the fridge to tell you what's missing.
This is why we can't have nice things. Any new technology is instantly leveraged to shove ads down people's throats and get them to buy more things they don't need.
I think that if the manufacturer is going to continue using the appliance for their own business purposes, they shouldn't be permitted to describe the transaction that causes you to possess it as a "sale", because you don't own it free and clear.
I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view.
If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to make your decision.
>I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning
Adding advertising into the mix almost always makes the incentives align more poorly with the customer's interest. For example, the refrigerator manufacturer now has an incentive to increase food spoilage to increase ad conversions.
>Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view
So you want to pay them to show you ads in the hopes that that means they don't stop supporting your refrigerator? What does that even mean? They're not going to extend your warranty.
> I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work.
Think of it like working conditions getting increasingly poor and abusive year over year, while your salary stays fixed.
It matters not because the deals are increasingly shit and abusive, but also because them being much better is within most of our's living memories, and there's no actual reason for things to go this shit, except a supplier-driven market fucking customers over because they can, and race-to-the-bottom mechanics preventing any single vendor from reversing course.
I didn't say increasing prices. I said decreasing quality. Price can stay fixed or even go down.
And yes, there's plenty of wrong with the free market, starting with that it's a hypothetical construct that doesn't exist, and even if it did, it's gameable and would have been gamed by the vendors the same way the real market is.
I mean more interactive way, not notifications being sent.
E.g. you start interaction by asking the fridge - I am a bit tired, what is an easy thing to cook based on what I have in the fridge and I am stopping by the store, is there anything I should buy to have a few more options.
So GPT vision takes image of what is in the fridge and then tries to solve for that question. If user is allergic to something that would be in GPT's prompt.
You may be at work, and store is on the way to work. Also what you described is quite many steps, and the images have to be taken at certain angles to capture everything.
It would be directly connected to GPT and you can either use it as mobile app or with other devices or fridge itself directly.
So for example you are at work, about to leave home, store is on the way and then you ask this question from the app. Fridge takes photo, forwards it with certain prompts to OpenAI APIs and then gives you the response.
So you're saying a fridge takes a photo (of itself, essentially... a selfie?), forwards it with certain prompts to a GPT and then gives you the response. But as I said earlier I might not like certain foods, or I may actively avoid certain foods for medical or religious reasons.
Now, if this was an explicit user-GPT interaction, you could prompt the GPT with "hey, I'm Muslim, what can I cook with this stuff?" or "hey, I'm lactose intolerant, what else could I buy?". You do need to trust the OpenAI provider, but not the fridge.
Instead, the fridge automatically talks to GPT. So if you want to avoid "dumb" suggestions you wouldn't be able to follow, you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?
I'm not "tinfoil hat" paranoid, I don't think people are out there to get me. But a certain dose of skepticism when it comes to data usage should be healthy, especially when many companies have been known to mess up this aspect (from Cambridge Analytica to Roomba employers sending pictures of a woman on the toilet to Facebook, and much more). You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?
In fridge it takes images from different angles, and different floors to make sure it is possible to identify all the items that exist in that fridge.
If you don't like certain foods, you can just customise the prompt that fridge sends to OpenAI. You can customise it through a web app or mobile app.
> you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?
What's the problem with storing your food preferences somewhere? People use dieting apps all the time on mobile.
> You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?
You are already sending your data in thousands of different ways and exposing yourself at any moment.
I'm not saying you should do more of it, but food preferences seems like a very minor drop in the bucket of all that you are already exposing.
Most people store their images in a cloud, which already indicate amazing amount about them. Just using a smartphone is 1000x worse than having food preferences stored somewhere.
Sure but it's something more for barely any actual advantage.
I accept that when I Google something Google and maybe other companies know what I searched, because Googling things is useful. I cannot bring an encyclopaedia and a detailed map of the whole world with me all the time, so it's a tradeoff I can accept.
I accept that, on the rare occasions I turn geolocation, someone will know where I am, because if I do turn it on, it's probably because I got lost. Then I turn it off and off we go.
Divulging food preferences for... an AI that suggests me what I should buy doesn't look like it's worth it. And it's not just food preferences. Remember people store medications in their fridge. A fridge so advanced it can recognize any food is probably capable of reading labels and knowing I bought medication for X,Y and Z. Which is definitely something I'm not explicitly telling people (or things) without a reason.
And don't forget the power of correlating data. Correlating food preferences with other data you could easily understand if someone is ill, pregnant, whether they follow a certain religion (think Ramadan, or not eating meat on Friday,...), whether they are living with someone else (buying twice the amount of stuff they usually buy?) and so on.
This is all stuff I try to avoid telling everyone. Yes, my doctor could be hacked and people could know I'm on medication anyway (hypothetically), but why divulge that voluntarily for essentially no reason?
Honestly you are just describing to me more exciting features. The correlations with potential illnesses, etc. Have all of your data piped into single location to use AI to improve your health.
you’re continuing to look at everything from a perspective of an altruistic product to consumer relationship and not the reality the other commenter is trying to describe.
yes it’s an “exciting feature” if your AI fridge can know that you’re pregnant and not recommend recipes that contain certain ingredients. what the other person is alluding to is that the data it has about you specifically will not stay contained between you and your fridge. what if you’re not married and your employer is like dave ramsey and fires women for being pregnant out of wedlock? or you live in a state with much more grim conditions currently around women and miscarriages? what if the meds in your fridge are related to HRT and there are orgs actively buying data to find these people to target them for bullying online (or worse)?
all of your data will inevitably end up in the hands of people that aren’t at all interested in improving your health. they’re interested in extracting value from you and your data or they have ill will towards you.
what starts as “exciting features” leads to your fridge tracking what groceries you purchase and what you consume. then it (or a third party that gets this data) makes determinations about your religion, your lifestyle, if you’re pregnant or not, etc without you knowing.
when every device in your house is collecting and selling off your data as a business model, there’s a significant mental overhead that needs to be expelled to ensure that you are able to keep your life private if you choose to. you may say: “don’t buy the appliances with the feature, then!” once a company can integrate these features effectively and subsidize hardware costs by selling the data, they’ll have other companies competing to offer the same so they can hit those target features and prices. eventually the market is flooded with appliances with these “exciting features” that are just gathering and selling data. in the end, we’ve traded our option to _choose_ privacy for a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. personally, i don’t believe the public is currently aware enough to understand the consequences.
I should be able to decide that I don't care about this type of privacy. Sure there are people out there that could be harmed by this. I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can. I should be able to choose to give my medical data to companies if there are ways to improve my lifestyle and quality from that. And to me that is exciting. I have been lucky to be born in a place where religion and other things like that don't matter. I see a lot of problems and ways life could be optimised. I notice daily how I spend so much time constantly on things that could just be automated away. And it is horrible knowing I am spending so much time on that.
We live in this World for a very limited time. If things can be automated, they should so we can choose exactly what we want to do with this time.
> I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can.
the problem is that “the market” doesn’t care what you believe in or what you “opt out” of.
there are devices that have programmed in alternate ways to phone home even if you choose to intentionally not connect it to wifi.
> If things can be automated, they should so we can choose exactly what we want to do with this time.
there’s very likely a CSA in your area that you can pay to deliver you fresh meats, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. some also provide recipes alongside.
it’s a much simpler solution in lieu of shoehorning tech into an appliance that will likely stop receiving bug fixes or security updates in 3-5 years when the company releases a new version.
like most of the tech industry, this is a “solution” looking for a problem.
The thing about data, unlike many common objects (ignoring 3d printers), is that you can easily copy data you control. So the fact that the fridge tells you "as an additional comfort in your pregnancy, I would add X" (if it even says that clearly) does not mean it also don't send data to other people.
Again, this is not a science fiction example. Many companies have successfully sent personal data to other companies or leaked that somehow to the Internet.
Personally this still makes me uncomfortable, even if I know this cannot be 100% avoided in today's world. So if I can avoid volunteering additional data to some company in exchange for voice activated lights, I'm happier. Maybe it's just me, though... but probably not.
It also (literally) opens up your home for many ideas and possibilities for attackers. Not just for the "haxxor" types, but the far more sneaky, sweet-talking ones.
It should not trigger just your imagination, but your paranoia.
Yes of course, but for example you already have your phone, laptops and computers with many things built in them. If you are ok with those, then it should be possible to build those smart devices with similar security and potential for attack.
I'm not. My phone, laptop and computers all run software that I get to install down to the OS (Linux, /e/OS), and I would never install something like the ChatGPT app on my phone.
> it should be possible to build those smart devices with similar security
It should be possible, but they are not. Don't forget: the "S" in IoT stands for "Security".
In any case, this is not even what I am talking about. What I am talking about is the "attack" being done by corporations into your house. It pains me to hear that people are willing to give so much of their privacy in the name of "convenience" and don't even show any slight concern over the thought of having so much data going to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and (now) OpenAI.
If you went to someone's home and they told you "by the way, my home is full of microphones and video cameras which are always on and used to power my digital assistant", how would you feel?
> by the way, my home is full of microphones and video cameras which are always on and used to power my digital assistant
Everyone are already walking around with smart phones that are perfectly able to do all of that.
> I'm not. My phone, laptop and computers all run software that I get to install down to the OS (Linux, /e/OS), and I would never install something like the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Fine if you do that.
> What I am talking about is the "attack" being done by corporations into your house. It pains me to hear that people are willing to give so much of their privacy in the name of "convenience" and don't even show any slight concern over the thought of having so much data going to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and (now) OpenAI.
I personally am not concerned about this, although I understand how people can be. I don't want to go my whole life avoiding things, concerned about what is being done with my data, and then I die. I have long dated option calls really out of money in all those companies (except OpenAI of course), in case one of them gets a massive data advantage and happens to discover singularity from this, so I would benefit from it anyway. Before that happens, they just use it to optimise ads for you, and I prefer optimised ads over random ads. Otherwise I'll do my best to block them, but if they get through, I prefer something I might actually be interested in and that might help me.
I prefer to see inventions and technology. At certain point humans will be outlived by technology anyway, and that's bound to happen. New inventions and tech are what is exciting and why I like living, seeing those things coming together.
> Everyone are already walking around with smart phones that are perfectly able to do all of that.
Being able to do it is not the same as actually doing it.
The rest of your argument, sorry but I can not respond without feeling angry. It just feels like the rationalizations of a selfish, too-clever-by-half neomaniac.
> Being able to do it is not the same as actually doing it.
You could have smart devices similarly only react or go to active mode when you press a button on your watch etc.
> The rest of your argument, sorry but I can not respond without feeling angry. It just feels like the rationalizations of a selfish, too-clever-by-half neomaniac.
Okay, I agree that your words can describe me well, but what do you think the end game for humans or tech is? Why do we exist here? Are we just here to reproduce over and over again with no change? And if there's always change, aren't you curious what will happen in the future?
Why did you go from one extreme (all new things are super exciting and should be desirable by anyone) to another (we are here to reproduce over and over again with no change) like this is a binary option?
"Tech" is a means, not an end. What problems are we solving with this tech, and what problems are we creating with the introduction of new technology? These are the only questions that I have when talking about technology, and I really don't see much sense in trying to turn into an existential question.
> aren't you curious what will happen in the future?
Not really, no. When facing a moral dilemma, I look to the past to see what mistakes can be avoided. I try to live in the present and take things as they are. I might look at the "current instant" to see where things are headed and if there are new opportunities being presented, but "the future" is something so out of reach and so out of control that I really give as little thought as possible.
I don't think there should be one. I also think that everyone that has come up with their idea is misguided, and all that tried to implemented one was/is a authoritarian psychopath who should be stripped of any power as soon as their nature got revealed.
Do you think that all the great artists from the past were motivated by technological progress in itself? Do you think Michaelangelo would make even more impressive works if he had better chisels or brushes? Do you think that The Beatles' would be even more popular if they could compose their songs on a computer?
Or even in a more mundane situation, do you think that someone volunteering on a hospital to entertain sick kids do not find meaning in what they do because they are not effectively helping to cure cancer?
There is another thread where you say you are not religious. I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if you are bowing down to the Altar of Technology to find meaning for your life, maybe religion is not so bad after all?
At times before now there was no indication that we could be seeing an acceleration of tech as is happening now. So there was no hope for people to see what is possible for us now. They sure were trying to figure out life. They just didn't have the right knowledge at the time.
But now that we do, I do think we should figure out what is going on here. I don't knownif you can call it religion or whatever, but the point is completing this puzzle and tech is necessary to do that.
I don't care enough to sacrifice my present to pursue some crazy Singularity and I certainly am not interested in sacrificing myself to give so much power to any single corporation, no matter how "good" their promises are.
Please, stop falling for the Kurzweil and Singularity crap. It's just the nerd version of the coming of the Messiah, with an extra dose of hubris on top.
> Please, stop falling for the Kurzweil and Singularity crap. It's just the nerd version of the coming of the Messiah, with an extra dose of hubris on top.
I don't know who you are talking about. It's my own thoughts. I'm not falling for at least anyone else's crap. If it's crap, then it's my own crap that I'm falling for.
> I don't care enough to sacrifice my present to pursue some crazy Singularity and I certainly am not interested in sacrificing myself to give so much power to any single corporation, no matter how "good" their promises are.
I think there should then be initiative to include everyone in the World in the top tech companies.
E.g. similarly you give everyone in the World a right to buy in to an ownership in limited amount given such a thing should occur. But every individual in the World can only buy one, equal unit.
This is why I buy those call options myself, but I think everyone in the World should have such call options.
You keep arguing based on how you believe
things should be instead of how they actually are. Do you realize how pointless this discussion is? And unless you have a way to show you are actively working to bring your ideas into reality, do you realize how naive and/or full of BS you sound?
> You keep arguing based on how you believe things should be instead of how they actually are. Do you realize how pointless this discussion is? And unless you have a way to show you are actively working to bring your ideas into reality, do you realize how naive and/or full of BS you sound?
I'm trying to problem solve here, because I want to see this tech.
Not OP but, regardless of why we exist here, change is not always good.
Change simply means that something becomes something else. It isn't inherently good.
For example, now I walk with both legs, but if a car hits me, I might stay on a wheelchair for some time, which is change, but not a welcome one. Before you say "this is a strawman argument", think about technologies like "cloud seeding", which are supposed to enforce specific weather conditions by spraying certain substances in the air (not clear on the details). This sounds like a cool idea, but is it, when some studies suggest this is dangerous for the environment? Shouldn't we (as humans) think about the effects before embracing change?
So, to me, change can be good or bad (or, often, a combination). If the goal of human life was change, it should probably be "change for good". Which is complicated - what is good and what is bad? Who gets to decide? Can I know in advance? What if something is eventually to be bad, can we get back? But that's how life is, no matter the end goal: complicated.
I would think the main goal of humans should be to understand what is behind all that. Why do we exist. It seems to me the best way to do that is to develop tech, and I would hope quick as otherwise I personally will obviously die before finding out.
What do you think the goal is?
I just think that at some point we will find out anyway and why not quicker then? Why let 5 or 10 more generations of humans go on if at some point we might reach an answer or an endpoint of some sort.
> I just think that at some point we will find out anyway and why not quicker then?
Because you and the corporations you support are making the lives of people worse now, and you are trading their wellbeing for your very minimal, personal comfort, and rationalizing it away with Pascal Wager-style of technocracy where "tech" could save you from dying.
Yes but while you can install Linux on your own, or even build your own computer if you're interested, you don't get to build a fridge or its operating system, and you most likely don't even have a valid way to see how it's configured (you may be able to hack it somehow, but it would probably void any warranty).
So...
do you upgrade your fridge OS? Maybe, maybe not. What happens if you do and an upgrade fails?
does it talk to the Internet? If it has to (by design), then all bets are off. You could try to mirror traffic and take a packet capture, but a fridge OS could easily use HTTPS over a "smart.myfridge.com" domain and you wouldn't know what's going on.
How does it even authenticate to whatever remote server they have? If it uses tokens or client certificates, what happens when they expire?
I'm a sysadmin, I know things fail. Even laptops and phones. But, while I can see valid use cases for laptops and phones, I still fail to see the actual appeal of most "smart home" appliances, outside of security systems. And I don't want to have nightmares about my fridge certificate expiration or not being able to turn your light on because my fiber connection went down.
> Yes but while you can install Linux on your own, or even build your own computer if you're interested, you don't get to build a fridge or its operating system, and you most likely don't even have a valid way to see how it's configured (you may be able to hack it somehow, but it would probably void any warranty).
You could install open sourced things to that fridge. E.g. the fridge could either come with sensors immediately available or just have convenient mounts to place your own cameras.
Maybe the fridge could have a simple linux box, raspberry PI or whatever set up. There could be a market where you can flexibly pick how immediately available solution you want or if you want to put in everything yourself and control, depending on how concerned you are about privacy and how technical you are.
If you want to have full control, you can just do that.
> do you upgrade your fridge OS? Maybe, maybe not. What happens if you do and an upgrade fails?
Most smart home devices in my experience update through a mobile app connected to your WiFi.
> What happens if you do and an upgrade fails
Fridge itself would still work, just the picture taking and ai guidance wouldn't.
> How does it even authenticate to whatever remote server they have? If it uses tokens or client certificates, what happens when they expire?
Through mobile app can update, reset everything.
> And I don't want to have nightmares about my fridge certificate expiration or not being able to turn your light on because my fiber connection went down.
These basic things like light and other base features you make sure can work even if smart software fails.
It is possible, but it mostly doesn't happen. And even when it does, "similar security and potential for attack" means needing regular security updates, which they tend not to receive.
the only thing I see worth using "smart" appliances on are lighting, thermostat, and security system. Everything else in my experience is extraneous and useless.
I hacked a few IKEA air quality sensors so, beyond their traffic-light color LEDs, they also log actual numeric measurements to Home Assistant. It's proving to be one of the more useful "ensmartiffication" for several reasons - including being able to check all the meters from one place on the go, and being able to position the device so its LED indicator isn't annoying my wife at night. But honestly, I wouldn't actually buy a smart device for this - soldering a NodeMCU into a cheap IKEA device is the sweet spot of relatively low skill required, and zero bullshit included.
I can't stand vendor apps. They're always garbage. In fact, the main reason I set up Home Assistant, and the main reason my wife embraced it and uses it daily, is because hooking up our A/C to it made it infinitely more useful than having it operated over the vendor shit app. With HA, either of us can reconfigure all A/Cs and then go and make tea or whatever, in time it took the official vendor app to fully open.
IoT is a disaster, Home Assistant and some tinkering is the only thing that makes it reasonable to have a smart device.
I bought the wife a "thermomix" because she was ranting/raving about how great it is. Its a glorified blender with a heating element that cost (at the time) well over a grand.
Its only after I bought it (and the free trial expired) that I discovered that an additional subscription is required to use the integrated "cooking recipe" service that guides you through cooking various dishes - insanely cheeky given how much it cost!
To top it off, I'm constantly nagged to connect the thing to WiFi so it can update god-knows-what. Never. Again.
I've "smartified" my washing machine by using as smart plug with included power meter. This gives me all the info I want to know about the washing machine and there are no vendors spying on my washing habits.
When the replacement thermostat of my fridge broke I replaced it with an ESP32 with a DS18B20 and a relay, now it posts temperature data to a logging server and the temperature range can be adjusted over WiFi when needed. Here again, I guess if it were really smart, that this would mean that the vendor would place the requirement of me sharing all the data with them so that they then give me a subset of data.
Really surprising to my that a Bosch / Miele can be had for less than $1000. In the US, it’s hard to find anything less than $3k in those brands. I have seen some places around here sell Beko, but only in white.
There’s more of a difference than just smart/not-smart, though. US tends to have those giant two-door fridges, we usually have single-door, stacked, fridge-freezer combinations.
And they just work. I’ve fridges going back 30 years which have never had so much as a compressor pump fail. Boring under-counter units, fridge/freezer stacked units, etc.
I think the European market is different, in general.
I also avoided smart appliances when replacing an oven and a washing machine recently. I would have considered them, though, if the "smart" part was based on the matter/thread standard. What I don't want, for sure, are appliances that need an internet connection using my Wi-Fi and only work with the manufacturer's app.
I'm a little confused about these fridge posts. There are refrigerators that do not have any tech that will last [most likely] longer than you stay in your home.
I've had multiple Subzero basic commodity or commercial refrigerators last 15-20 years with only minor parts replacements which are easily found. Of course these are not cheap, but isn't that what everyone here is asking for? Something made well that lasts a long time?
They don't look fancy at all and nobody even knows it's a Subzero because there are no labels on it and no stainless steel front.
I had never heard of Subzero before this post, and just looked them up.
$10k-$15k for a refrigerator?
I’ve only ever owned fairly “basic” refrigerators (e.g. LG or GE), that are about 1/10 of that cost, and have never had any problems with them going out or even degrading in quality (e.g. 10+ years). Maybe needed an ice maker repair, but that’s about it.
Do people need to spend that kind of money for a refrigerator that lasts?
Maybe if you’re going to be in your home for 30-40 years, but not many people stay in one place long enough to outlive these “basic” refrigerators. And even then, I’d argue that a $1k-$2k refrigerator can still last that long.
(I’m using “basic” in quotes here because I feel like our refrigerators weren’t even the bottom tier — they’re quite large, and have the features we need. But now seeing other brands that cost as much as some vehicles, to some they may seem basic.)
There was a fancy kitchen design store I wandered into a few months ago, and they had a few really interesting refrigerators.
You opened the door, and there was SPACE. The refrigerator was taller than I was, and very wide. I think it was subzero, but I could be wrong.
It seemed like you could take the 30 lb turkey from thanksgiving and just set it on a shelf, without giving up much space.
Afterwards looking at other refrigerators, even the ingenious ones, I was struck by how complicated they were. You would still be fighting to find a place for something in the refrigerator, or looking for something you lost.
For computer folks, it was the refrigerator equivalent of an organized rack of servers, instead of a bunch of systems crammed under your desk with wires going whereever.
Subzero became a "status" brand in the US 25 years ago. It's common to find them in US kitchens that are designed to impress rather than to cook in. (Just like Viking ranges.)
Subzero might in fact be a decent-quality fridge--I have no idea because I refuse to pay a status tax on appliances.
"I have no idea" but I have strong negative opinions.
Designed to impress who? You can't tell a SZ fridge by looking at it, there are usually no labels. I know of a few professional chefs who buy these fridges, does that mean they are just buying them to impress?
I’d say if you’re a professional chef, that’s a little more understandable — it’s your livelihood.
But this discussion is more around what average people are looking for (e.g. smart vs. dumb appliances), and not so much about commercial appliances that most people aren’t the target consumer for.
Re: impressing people and the lack of labels, just looking at images of SZ refrigerators, these are clearly distinguishable from consumer grade refrigerators. They clearly have the appearance of belonging in a commercial chef’s kitchen.
Out of curiosity, though, you said you’ve had multiple SZ refrigerators — why did you choose those over, e.g. a $1k-$2 LG/GE/Samsung refrigerator? Did you not think it would last more than a few years?
You said:
> I've had multiple Subzero basic commodity or commercial refrigerators last 15-20 years with only minor parts replacements which are easily found.
I could replace “Subzero” with any of the above brands, and say the same thing. So just trying to figure out what you’re willing to pay 10x for.
Genuinely curious, as I feel I may be missing something.
Multiple from two different homes, the sub zeros were the age of the house and still going strong.
I avoid LG/Samsung because of the countless articles here an other places were people complain about the quality of appliances, but yet the mass majority of [different] people still buy these crappy appliances with touch screens and glossy finishes.
My point is that these appliances do exist, no feature, long lasting, easily reparable, expensive. People do not want to pay for them as much as HN says they do. For a bunch of smart Engineers I don't understand why this is difficult to grasp. If you want quality, you have to pay for it.
I definitely agree, but I also believe this applies to some products more than others, and I think there are also diminishing returns as you pay more.
For example, I can say I’ve probably owned 3 refrigerators over the past 20 years (two different homes), and probably paid less than $5000 total. The refrigerator in the last home is probably still going strong, and the one in this home will probably last another 5-10 years at least, and definitely longer than we’ll be in this home.
I think we may have had one repair call at the last home, and none yet on this one (though I’ll admit that the ice maker is currently out, and I’ve not taken the time to diagnose it, and may or may not need a repair call).
Would I pay 2x if I knew I was guaranteed not needing a repair call. Maybe, but not definitely. Would I pay 10x though? Definitely not (unless I was gaining other benefits).
But I also believe I did decent research before purchasing all of these, and that probably played more of a role vs. how much I paid.
But again, will agree that a lot of times you do get what you pay for. I’ve been bitten before by trying to save money.
I just also believe that people with money can tend to overpay for things with diminishing returns, and there’s a balance that can be struck between quality and cost. And I’ve also been bitten by overpaying for something that wasn’t worth the premiums cost in the end (e.g. upper end computer parts can definitely have diminishing returns).
People SAY that want well made, simple things. But people will generally not PAY FOR simple, well made things when much cheaper options are available. You and I might, and many others as well. But the vast majority of folks will not pay more for a higher quality, longer lasting item.
Another example is Speed Queen for washers and dryers. They are substantially more expensive and look very plain and even old fashioned. But they are built to last a long time and be repairable. They have a large part of the laundromat market because the laundromat owners do value these qualities. But they have very little of the consumer market, because consumers don't.
Consumers also tend to favor nice-sounding features that are in fact unreliable and frustrating, such as ice makers in the refrigerator compartment.
"People SAY that want well made, simple things. But people will generally not PAY FOR simple, well made things when much cheaper options are available. You and I might, and many others as well. But the vast majority of folks will not pay more for a higher quality, longer lasting item."
One problem I see is that the higher priced items are not necessarily higher quality these days. A lot of brands are coasting on their reputation while selling cheaply made items at premium price.
Most consumers don’t need commercial-level quality for appliances.
Those appliances are built to handle much more usage, and for a much longer time. E.g. a washer in a laundromat will be used probably 10x compared to a consumer washer over the same amount of time.
Also, a laundromat wants the washer to last as long as possible, probably 20-30 years, but at least 10-15.
There’s no reason for consumers to spend 10x on commercial appliances, when they’re not used as often, and won’t need to endure the misuse/abuse that commercial appliances take.
Also, few residents stay in one place long enough to need an appliance to last more than 15 or so years, and most consumer appliances last that long.
I totally agree! In a way, this is my point. For the most part, people are rationally choosing to pay less money for lower-quality, shorter-lived appliances. Because they don't need them to last a long time. There are basically two markets for these things: commercial and consumer. Similar with printers as well, or even power tools. The cheaply made junk that most people (rationally!) buy, and the expensive, well made stuff that only those who care and can afford buy.
Except when people are made aware of the commercial market and able to score something off it, suddenly it turns out they like the reliability, the ergonomics, the lack of bullshit.
Consumers ain't choosing shit. People are talking here as if most people were drowning in money, and shopping around for low price as a pastime. On the contrary, people are starved for funds, they buy cheap out of necessity, enduring whatever abusive or lazy bullshit the manufaturer pulled off to offer their wares slightly cheaper.
20 years ago you could buy a simple, reliable, mid-low priced fridge and expect it to last 20 years. The only reason I replaced mine (a Sears branded Whirlpool) is that some idiot contractors destroyed it. It lasted 20 years without a single repair.
I had a similar era whatever of Whirlpool's bargain basement brand was in my apartment in the city. That one did stop cooling reliably, but a $20 relay and 10 minutes fixed that right up. I didn't even bother to call the landlord.
With few exceptions you'll find similar stories from most well known brands up through the mid 00s.
People are used to being sold overcomplicated cheaply made things priced the same as well made things. Paying more is hardly ever a guarantee of getting better quality so without any ability to tell if something is actually good it does make more sense to go with the cheaper option.
> all make some no-frills models that can save both money and frustration
Actually, those features seem to have become so common that they don't seem to command a price premium anymore. My washing machine was the cheapest that ticked all the boxes I wanted (most importantly size), and it still has some kind of wifi thingy. Ditto for my dishwasher.
They both work perfectly well without any connection to anything, and not once have they even tried to get me to connect them.
For the washing machine, a notification that it's done can be useful. I usually do laundry while I'm either working or playing some game, so 9 out of 10 times I won't hear that it's done and forget to take the clothes out. Now I've taken the habit of setting an alarm to check on it after the estimated time is up.
For the dishwasher, I really don't care. The dishes can stay there until I need them.
Not that I know of, and you actually have to go out of your way to turn the Wifi on and connect. They have indicator lights that are off.
And it's not like they're TVs, I doubt they'd be able to show me any add on their 7-segment displays. So I'm not sure what would be the benefit of trying to connect to a network and let LG know that I've washed some clothes.
We should also hope they remain cheaper, and companies don’t start selling the “smart” appliances for less with the idea that they can somehow makeup for it on data collection or ongoing upsells and subscriptions.
I wouldn't. Cost to make a device "smart" is much less than $1 in parts, app and infrastructure are not rocket science and even with no evil intentions you get very valuable data on usage, what breaks first, environment, location etc. Seems like a no-brainer.
Those will soon also not require you to connect them to your wifi, NB-IoT both chips and plans cost for businesses are already very good.
Thanks to Tuya, the software and infra side for making a garbage-quality IoT device is effectively free now. You may be surprised just how much of those you have around you. Any random device class that suddenly gained optional "control through app/voice assistants" feature is likely Tuya in disguise - magic of white-label IoT.
Sure, touchscreen is expensive, but if you just have notification on your phone that the door is not closed properly that's already considered "smart". Basically anything connecting to your home network is advertised as such.
I honestly wonder how big that market has gotten in the last few years, and I’m including software/services in it.
I know I’m definitely part of that market and also that the most technophile people from my list of friends and acquaintances are mostly working in non-tech industries. For example I was very surprised when visiting an acquaintance that works in the media and the first thing he did when he entered the house was to “talk” with Alexa, we have such a device at home but to this day it still is unboxed, hence uninstalled (received it at an IT event).
One of the happier things I’ve done for myself lately, at the advice of this forum, was to get a rock-solid, dumb, black-and-white Brother laser printer. It sits there and just does its job and I never have to think about it.
Does anyone have any tips as to the white-goods equivalents? Fridge, freezer, laundry machines, that kind of thing?
If you can afford it get Breville. I was really shocked at how much better quality their appliances were when I got my first one. The microwave controls for example are 10x more intuitive and thoughtful than anything I’d seen before.
Ehhhhh. I got one of the fancy Breville toaster ovens because the (gas) oven in my apartment was so janky. If that's best in class, I'd hate to see the competition. The controls take 1–2 seconds to wake up, it makes the most horrendous beeping noises, the convection fan causes some funky resonance occasionally, the nonstick coating means you have to be careful cleaning it, the preheat timer is overly optimistic, the door spring is way too strong, etc, etc.
It works but I definitely don't love it, and I'm left wondering how hard it would've really been to remedy most of the annoyances. For the price (and given the reviews) I was definitely expecting better.
Big note on this - Only the top loaders are available in the old-school "ultra-reliable" version that I think many want. Top loaders are more rough on clothes than front loaders. Many reputable repair techs claim that LG makes very solid and reliable front loaders which are more gentle on clothes than the speed queen front loaders.
I was dead set on a speed queen top loader and then my wife started showing me this stuff (specifically detailed tests showing speed queens top loaders being rough on clothes)
I've used both a top loader (currently a speed queen) and a front loader washer each for more than a decade. I have many t-shirts that are 20+ years old. Any wear from the washer seems negligible in comparison to the wear from actually wearing the clothes. There's no discernible difference.
But there's a HUGE difference in terms of ability to clean. If I'm out doing yardwork and I have a pair of jeans with deep mud stains on the knees the old style top loader agitators can clean them just fine. The front loaders cannot no matter how many times I run them through. I end up having to scrub the jeans between my knuckles in the laundry sink - moderate agitation breaks up the mud and it rinses out easily.
I suspect a lot of this "agitators are rough" nonsense comes from modern washers that don't use a sufficient amount of water. But the SQ has a setting to use the normal amount of water so it's a non-issue. Most analysis I've seen (eg: from Consumer Reports) refuses to consider top loaders with normal water usage settings -- the data is basically invalid. A lot of Consumer Reports analysis has this type of problem where the entire study is built on a false premise.
Front loaders might be fine if your clothes never get dirty and only need occasional light rinsing. They're really terrible for actually cleaning dirt.
The LG front loaders are very good at cleaning clothing. Wirecutter has done actual tests, and they seem to perform nearly as well as top loaders with agitators, but they don’t damage clothing anywhere near as much. My experience matches — mine cleans even better than the top-loader-with-agitator than I remember as a kid, and it’s much much better than the crappy commercial coin-operated top-loader I used to use.
(They do try to minimize water usage, which means that if you have the water soluble sort of mess on the laundry, you may need to select a “heavy soil” mode or add something wet and heavy to the load. The former takes two straightforward button presses, although LG sadly seems to have switched to capacitive “buttons” on newer models.)
Also, the speed wash cycle is genuinely fast and seems to work fine.
edit: What do you mean top loaders with normal water usage? Most top loaders want as much water is needed to cover the clothing. They gain nothing except longer cycle time if you use more water, and they don’t get clothing clean if you use too little.
I've used the LG frontloaders. They are not effective at removing muddy stains. They simply can't do the job.
Wirecutter doesn't publish their methodology, but every "tester" who has focuses on questionable metrics -- such as testing stain types that don't require agitation to remove.
In my experience most people who are happy with them don't have very dirty clothing to begin with.
Regarding normal water usage: It is not true that washers "gain nothing" by using more water. More water protects clothing under agitation and aids in removing dirt. From the SQ manual:
"Wash delicate items usually washed by hand on this cycle. A full tub of water is recommended (even for small loads) to allow the delicate items to move freely through the water. More water helps reduce fabric wear, wrinkling, and provides for a clean wash."
2) Low water modes clean less effectively and are rougher on clothes
3) Front loaders are designed to work with low water loads, but still don't clean well
3) All modern washers are now terrible, except models that intentionally skirt regulations - such as SQ
High-water agitation is the best by far. The only drawback is increased water use - which is insignificant. The entire issue is a result of bad washer regulations.
There isn't anything that fundamentally makes a top loader clean better than a front loader per se.
And while I don't doubt your SQ top loader with a full agitator does an absolutely fantastic job when compared to a modern front loader you have a big apples/oranges comparison problem.
And if you live in Austin, I would be willing to have a cloths cleaning video made against my 25 year old kenmore/frigidare front loader. :) And that is simply because (as of a couple years ago when I checked) my front loader uses closer to as much water as a modern top loader. It puts a good 6" of water in the tub and has a much smaller capacity that most of the modern front loaders because it has a very small opening and a fairly deep tub but is also narrower front to back. Given the agitators are about the same as the water depth, the cloths can be fully submerged/agitated out.
I to do a lot of outdoor work/repair (including that stupid washer's bearing), and things get dirty/greasy/etc and that washer has consistently amazed me just how good a job it does, and as a bonus when I got it I was also amazed at how much longer it seemed many of my cloths were lasting. I have 25 year old shirts that still look fairly new. So IMHO that washer has been a bit of a miracle worker, which is why despite being used at much greater duty cycle than your average home washer for the past 15 years (think ~15-20 loads a week, don't ask), every time it starts to need another bearing set, I upset my wife by fixing it. The parts cost like $30, and now that I've done it a few times its a ~2 hour job. Although, last time I sorta re-engineered the bearing set after discovering some new bearing technology better suited to being in a wet/soapy environment like a washer, so its possible I may have significantly extended how long it goes between bearing replacements (aka hopefully I never have to do it again). It also seems to spin significantly faster than many of the modern front loaders, which is seemingly at least part of the problem with the bearing loads.
FWIW, we've had an LG front-loader for the last 5 years and have had zero issues. They do have a wifi capability to notify, but we've never connected them or felt the need to. If we moved, I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one.
We bought a Maytag set because it's capacity was larger than the Speed queens. I've never been more angry at a company. We threw in the towel and junked them they were so bad. Literally couldn't give them away bad. Apparently everyone I knew either already knew or trusted my experience so I couldn't unload them.
Now, we have speed queens and I no longer am using buckets to fill our washing machine, don't have to babysit it, it doesn't randomly jump in the air suddenly as it's gotten out of balance for the 4th time in the day. I would never willingly wish that upon someone.
buy the simplest devices you can. I believe whirlpool still makes some models in the USA. Evidently (according to reddit) never buy a Samsung or LG kitchen appliance. Whateve r you do get online (reddit and other places) and look for the specific model you're looking at, never buy on a whim, do research. You can eat out for a couple nights if the fridge goes.
Exactly, simple is good. Software is not simple. Internet-connected software is definitely not simple. If you want anything to work reliably long-term, avoid devices with remote dependencies that the manufacturer will deprecate as soon as they get bored of maintaining them. Anything you want to last more than 5 years should be able to work completely offline.
Yes, analog stuff can be built tough too. See the vacuum cleaners that still work after 50 years lol, because they were overengineered. That's not nearly as profitable, though. So bean counters (fail early, but after warranty period, fail often) are ever at war with engineers who'd rather make a good product for a fair price. I have heard good things about Bosche but yet to buy anything. I will definitely consider them. I'm not really afraid of things made in Europe or USA, unless internet research proves otherwise.
Software can be simple too. I haven't needed anything more from my email client, photo editing, word processor or file manager apps for close to a decade.
As far as I'm concerned these tools are feature complete and can be used without subscriptions that phone home constantly.
Samsung fridge, oven, microwave, and washer-dryer user here.
Only the washer dryer was able to get online, and it's the only appliance that had to be replaced after 4 years, but not because of that. The build quality was so-so, it had problems drying and repair was considered unreasonable (leaky hot air ducts, fast wear on the bearing).
The microwave spontaneously loses screws in the door though
I didn't get the advice do to this, but this is where I landed with my home printer needs, cheap Brother wirelsss B&W Laser Printer.
Unfortunatley for appliances these days, to get fewer options you actually have to go up in price. It took me a long time, for example to even land on an oven that was minimalistic with knobs that you turn to set the temperature and turn it on (overall the oven isn't simple enough, because it still has too many logic boards that were replaced three times in the first year, until they got it right).
I gave up my old gas stove that cost $400 new, worked for 25 years, without fail.
Even when I was at the new appliance store, looking at the fancy stuff, the sales guy was impliying short life span, and repair contract needs, etc...
+1000 for the B+W Brother laser printer. I've had it for years and it always prints when asked, no drivers or weird software, works from any device on WiFi. I've never replaced the toner.
That's going to vary by appliance. The appliance sales and repair shops that have youtube channels are a pretty good resource (Ben's Appliances and Junk, Yale Appliance, Boulevard Home, etc). But so is intuition.
Buy whatever you can get service for. This rules out Samsung and LG, but in a smaller area this might rule out some other brands. In general avoid LG unless you want a front loading washer, and avoid Samsung in general.
There aren't that many manufacturers. Bosch, Thermador, and Gaggenau; Whirlpool / Amana / KitchenAid / Maytag / Jennair; Electrolux / Frigidaire / Zanussi / Westinghouse /; etc etc etc. Ikea's all Frigidaire these days, and Kenmore you've gotta check the part number (typically Whirlpool or LG).
Dishwasher – pretty much the universal opinion is Bosch. The quiet part is that their current lineup has design decisions you may not like (no heating element, no grinder). And they definitely feel cheap. But they're quiet and USA made.
Washer – Speed Queen for a top loader, but again read up on the caveats. Whirlpool's commercial lineup is basically their consumer lineup from 20 years ago. They may be cheaper/easier to buy and service than Speed Queen. Lots of folks seem to love LG front loaders.
Fridge – top freezers with no ice maker are about as simple, efficient, and reliable as you can get. But Whirlpool's current top freezers are junk. Supposedly Whirlpool's more expensive fridges are still decent. Other designs (e.g. bottom freezer) are more complicated and will be less efficient. At the higher end Bosch's big side by sides with the dual compressors are supposed to be pretty solid.
Ranges – figure out what you want and go from there. Samsung is reportedly pretty bad with gas ranges, and obviously electronics aren't their strong suit either. Induction ranges will typically have more assemblies and fewer individual components to replace ($$$ to service). With induction the low end Frigidaires don't have any WiFi bullshit, but only the higher priced brands (and Samsung) will eschew the touchscreens.
Microwaves – American kitchens tend to feature those big hulking units hung right over the stove. But counter top models are waaay cheaper and all mostly the same guts.
Gonna sound very short through the corner, but german brands usually are pretty no bullshit. Also filter out anything that seems like it has a screen (or a more complicated screen than a simple LED panel) and doesn't need it.
Your fridge and freezer don't need any more screens than a LED panel telling you the current temperature and the laundry machine can make due just fine with a LED panel + some buttons and turning knobs.
I bought a chest freezer and regretted it. Not because it failed but because it's too easy to bury stuff. Sold it to a buddy after 3 years for 1/3 the original cost. He's still using it, but he's a hunter/fisherman, going on 10 years now.
I think they’re basically extinct on the high end. Your best option will be to get a smart TV and never set it up with a network connection.
You’ll maybe want to do firmware updates now and then, but you can plug it in temporarily for those. It’ll still do more than you strictly want it to, but the most invasive behaviors will be off the table.
Alternatively you can get a huge computer monitor and use that as your TV. But there’s some issues with that approach. Monitors are designed for sitting closer up and may not have as good viewing angles.
I've got an LG OLED TV, it's connected to the internet and I use the apps, but don't seem to have any annoyances like voice control or adverts; it allows you to use it without agreeing to all the T's and C's, and if you don't agree to the ones about advertising or voice activation it just works.
YMMV, anecdotal, it might get patched out later, I don't know. I hope EU consumer and privacy laws are protecting me in this case.
Appliance engineers probably have their equivalent of "Kubernetes and SPA used for no good reason at all and now we can't focus on the actual features"
By now, making UI with (by now not completely) SPA frameworks specifically made for that task is just better developer experience. I won't go back to pretty much html string concation via templates. Why do people keep pretending it's better in any way is lost on me.
Using a traditional templating engine is not treating HTML more as a string than React based frameworks do. Maybe even lass so, because of the separation of concerns. Traditional tenplating engines can separate part of HTML into named components without problem. Check for example Jinja2 or its clones in other languages. There is really no need to treat HTML in a plain PHP string concattenation style. There has not been for decades.
If you want something more structured data, look at sxml (see Racket or Guile). Then implement that in a library and use it in place of the default of most (all?) SPA frameworks.
It's well understood that the reason people drag in these unnecessary frameworks is often because they prioritise their developer experience over the user experience, and you're just proving the point ;)
For what it's worth, the developer experience is also highly subjective.
I remember when NextJs could not properly watch files and rebuild when files are changed, because it has a problem with emacs backup files. It would crash and the I would have to restart the watch, defeating the whole purpose. An issue exists/ed on Github, but no real interest was there to fix it. Just to name one example of dev XP that was worse.
The need to deal with whole NPM ecosystem is another point, that significantly negatively impacten my dev XP compared to rendering plain old school templates in other ecosystems.
Yeah the backlash against SPAs doesn’t make any sense. Server side rendering is fine for documentation etc. but full applications don’t want to be simulated on a server, client-server makes complete sense.
Webservers shall create and provide the readily HTML so browsers can render the website without JavaScript. Actually text-browsers should render it and also allow disabled persons using it without hassle.
Instead SPA (or more direct JavaScript) is used to force the browser to assemble the HTML and it is slow and waste resources. Creating website which create load on the client-site is bad because we’ve power on the server dedicated for this task - not so on client.
Looking back web-developers need something imperative and more direct than CGI, PHP or JSP. The initial backslash against JS was right. I sadly shipped JS.
When a powerful application is needed? Make a native application and use an appropriate toolkit (Gtk or QT).
I agree you’re right in that the current tech stack is bad. But the answer is to fix that, and I think (very) slowly we will.
JS was a terrible language but nowadays it is pretty good in some areas, passable in others, with some horror shows left in. The ecosystem and tooling are the real problems. I don’t understand why these issues haven’t been addressed by Google et al.
Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain. Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync. People expect collaboration as table stakes, which makes that task even harder.
I agree accessibility is a problem.
Ironically the Java applet had the right idea, as a compromise between our positions, but wrong time and maybe wrong language? Its Swiss cheese security didn’t help either.
> Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain.
Quality isn't free, yes.
> Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync.
Don't tightly couple applications and backend service versions (where a backend is even needed, otherwise make it all local) and this is not a problem. You should be using open (relatively stable) protocols wherever possible anyway.
Web apps "solve" platform differences by completely disregarding them and expecting users to adapt to the application instead. This does not make them better.
Quality isn’t free and native applications provide quality (reliance, performance, integration, usability).
The platform issues just moved to WebKit, Blink and Gecko. New platform issues and the web developers complain like application developers ;)
Companies favor the web usually to lower their own cost, give them control over users and being free of rules. Users pay for it. With higher hardware requirements (Electron), loss of data, loss of control and the absence of usability. And as states above, a website shall not stress my CPU or RAM.
The worst example is Microsoft Teams.
The best example is your preferred Matrix client application.
Theres about zero websites I use that I want to be "full applications". For things that should be applications I prefer native (open source) desktop programs.
If you are concatenating strings of HTML, you are basically asking for an injection attack.
There are lightweight frameworks (like knockout) that keep things simple but keep you safe with bindings, without giving up control to a bigger framework.
I just replaced the condenser fan (was squealing) and the evaporator defrost heater (it wasn't working at all, leading to the coils icing over) on my 20-year-old GE fridge. I threw in some SwitchBot BLE temp sensors that I monitor with Home Assistant, with alerts set to fire if it can't hold temperature or if the defrost cycle doesn't seem to be working, as measured by the swing between the "pre-chill" before defroster heater kicks on, and the temperature/humidity rise as it works.
$40 in parts rescued a fridge that my subdivision neighbors each traded up years ago the first time theirs started acting up. I already had the BLE sensors.
Runs like a champ, and remains free of an IP address.
I cannot speak for that fridge as I don't know the energy usage. But the sad fact is that often buying a brand new machine will pay for itself in only 2 or 3 years over a 'free' older fridge or freezer (at least here in the UK).
I have a 'keezer' - a chest freezer I run at fridge temps to store and serve homebrew beer.
Buying a new A+ rated chest freezer cost me £199 but only costs £35 a year to run. A friend scored a free 15 yo freezer from Facebook and it costs just under £100 a year to run. So he saved £200, but now is down £65 a year. It won't take long for my keezer to be significantly cheaper over a 5 year horizon.
I hate to see old tech wasted, but the energy and cost savings can be significant.
Did he clean the condenser and replace the door seal? Dirty/clogged condensers and leaky door seals have a huge effect on efficiency.
Also, if his is not a chest freezer, that's another big difference --- a chest freezer is inherently better if opened often, since the cold air stays at the bottom, whereas in an upright one, it spills out.
Yes another chest freezer - and yes that usage is pretty good for a freezer of that age - when I've tested other brewers set-ups they can be even worse (but that is often when they've clad them in wood - looks cool but stops the freezer cooling properly...)
I'll get them to check it is clean, but I'll assume it is as he's pretty on top of that sort of thing.
I got an eye opener when a fridge with a 10yr parts warranty came with a $2100 labor bill to actually install the broken condensor. I'm not sure why the condensor would be built in such a way that swapping one out can cost $2100...but it was cheaper to purchase another fridge, this time with a top of the line parts and labor warranty
This infuriated me greatly because of the waste, not one of money, but for the environment. I considered paying the $2100 just to avoid the environmental waste, but realized this would probably be only one in a line of upcoming repairs.
The "side by side" standard US frige is what we call in France American fridge because it has two door and look so oversized and fancy compared to the standard fridge in france.
The US "french-door fridge" take the oversizing a step further by adding a third door on the bottom of the "side by side" design. We don't even have a name for theses fridges as nobody buy theses, so I guess we'd call them big American fridge.
Symmetrically EU "regular fridge" probably don't sell in the US because it's perceived as too small. An thus is probably called small/tiny fridge.
Importantly, in the "side by side" fridge, the two sides are separate compartments; one side is a freezer and the other is the refrigerator.
In the "french door" fridge, the two doors on the top both open to the same compartment, which is the refrigerator. The bottom compartment is a freezer and opens as a drawer.
Does food in the US not go off? The limiting factor for me isn't the size of my fridge, but the fact that after a week all my vegetables are looking sad and my milk's starting to smell. I probably wish my fridge was bigger a handful of days a year - and that's because I'm having a party and need to squeeze in more wine and beer.
Quite a lot of my fridge is taken up with random jars that I'll probably never eat. A bigger fridge would just enable more of those.
Having lived on both sides of the pond, you'd tend to buy different kinds of products, in USA the grocery variety pushes you towards less fresh/spoiling products and more towards various processed products which will up a fridge for weeks.
And also actually food in US does somehow seem to last for longer, as probably the manufacturers anticipate this need and optimize for that (as there's no free lunch, likely at the expense of other factors); I'd never ever buy a half-gallon of milk in a single container in EU because it would start to go bad by the time I get to the end of it, but in USA that was fine.
Which begs the question - what not-yet-in-the-spotlight chemical crap makes this happen? Since ingredients are the same, devices are the same yet they last longer as you mention.
Maybe something about vastly different food quality standards between the sides of the pond.
There are many factors the general public is not aware of but that play a major role in food shelf life; the whole field of "food technology" is pretty amazing and under appreciated.
Chemical treatments are not the only factor- in terms of fresh commodities (fruits and vegetable) varieties grown play a big role; so too might post-harvest treatments such as irradiation (might be for phytosanitary reasons, but often can extend shelf life if the commodity can withstand it and remain high quality), nano particle coatings that reduce water loss and spoilage.. these are just a few of the things that are going on "behind the scenes" to make our food last longer and reduce food waste.
If you would like to learn more here is a good review on physical treatments specifically for cereal crops: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5920410/ . There is an awful lot that goes into "food quality", and there are important trade offs with every choice.
> And also actually food in US does somehow seem to last for longer, as probably the manufacturers anticipate this need and optimize for that (as there's no free lunch, likely at the expense of other factors);
Probably taste, at least anecdotally - every single person from my side of the world that visited the US that I talked to, mentions the food there tastes just bland in general - and that's both veggies and highly-processed foods.
In my experience, american fridges contain products that do not perish as easily. Lots of frozen goods and processed foods. Even the fresh foods seem to last longer out here. Milk lives for 2 weeks, their bread is unkillable and longer lasting greens (Kale) are more popular.
where I live the groceries are in the next town over and most people I know go once a week. At the end of the week you have improvised casserole to get rid of anything that is on the verge of funkiness. Always keep some amount of frozen and shelf stable in reserve as well.
I also do canning out of my garden and that stuff will last for ages.
Lower population density and bad zoning means the trip to the grocery store is farther, so you only want to go once every week or two. So, you get a bigger car, to fit more groceries and a bigger fridge for the same reason.
Then, some stupid person fills their car completely with groceries, can’t see out the back window, and backs into you. So, you get a still bigger car, so they can’t possibly help but see you, and then you crash into them, and it goes back and forth until we are driving around in these land-ships.
It actually makes sense to own a larger car and fridge in this case. I wouldn't have thought about this as I usually go once or twice a day to the grocery store and just buy what I currently need as the grocery is on my way to work (walking distance).
There’s a hilarious Reddit post I always come back to, where an American was pining for a delicious loaf of bread that he bought on a whim in Australia. Said it was the best bread he’s ever had. Fresh, tasty, nothing like what he had back home. After some prodding by the commenters it became evident that it was a standard loaf of supermarket-brand white bread. But it’s still better than the ‘it’s just a crappy cake’ bread that he was used to in the US.
Now Australia’s food quality is pretty damn good compared to most other countries, but it’s just as much if not more of an indication that the average quality of food in the US is abysmal. From the week or so I’ve spent in the US, in a major coastal city, as a ‘rich’ person seeking good food, I’ve gotta say that this is my belief.
So in short I don’t think that many Americans are getting decent bread.
They probably aren't getting decent bread. Grocery store bread is mostly crap and/or ridiculously overpriced (like $6 for a mid-sized loaf of 'brioche' with more sugar than butter), and bakeries are much less common than grocery stores.
No, we just have a habit of putting up with needless inconvenience. It's ingrained in us somehow, possibly as a result of the deprevations during and after WWII.
At some point you just have to accept that there are certain things the Americans have gotten right, and we haven't. Family-sized fridges, laundry machines which are roughly colocated with clothes storage and (arguably) sink-based garbage disposals are examples of that.
We do have a thing in the US called a micro fridge. College students will often get one for their dorm rooms.
For the biggest fridge you describe, the extra space is usually a freezer. If you are going to have a freezer anyway, it seems like an overall savings to include it in the fridge. If you don’t have a freezer, you won’t have any icecream, and then is life really worth living?
Are these fridges compressor-based like the larger fridges or Peltier (thermoelectric) like a lot of food "hot/cold boxes"? The latter are hugely inefficient, though on such a small scale maybe it doesn't matter as much...
What you call 'American pizza' is basically just Italian focaccia with just more stuff on top, with very thick bland crust. Literally nobody in Europe eats pizza in such a form, not in restaurants at least, and for Italians living in Italy that would be a proper insult. Then in my experience there is simply too much on top of it, especially too much cheese, so 1/2 of US pizza is way more filling and has tons of calories compared to full one down here.
I am not commenting on taste which may end up more than fine, just looks. But that thick crust adds tons of empty sugar calories to the food that originally doesn't have so much.
At first, I thought "Wow, this guy knows a bunch about fridges!" but then I realized it's not by choice. I like not having to know anything about my fridge except basic maintenance, it feels like a gift now.
Late last year over the span of two months I got the privilege of learning how to diagnose and repair problems with my water heater (bad flame sensor), HVAC (feather/cruft blocking a tube), and oven (bottom element burned out).
While I’m glad enough to save the money, definitely not eager to learn how to fix the fridge too.
Yeah the figuring it out part feels good sometimes, but since it's rarely the same thing that goes wrong each time then the learning doesn't actually help much. Hence the repair man who supposedly does stuff like this all day frequently not finding the root cause.
Or if it is the same thing each time, that's equally frustrating.
My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit.
My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be standard in the industry. Same for the capacitor: the part is only $17 but the authorized service companies want several hundred dollars to replace it, a job that should only take 15 minutes. It's almost as if they know they have us over a barrel.
My appliance repair guy, who repairs appliances all day and has seen it all, told me to hold on to my (relatively old) appliances as long as possible because they are more easily repaired than the newer ones. Sure, it's his job to fix things so he has incentive to repair rather than recommend a replacement (in which he would make $0) but I trust him: when my 20-year-old microwave oven recently died, he said it would be several hundred dollars to fix and would not be worth the money (I agreed).
So yes, many old appliances have broken and were likely not worth repairing, but on average all the evidence points to newer devices being more finicky, easily broken, and harder and more expensive to repair than older, simpler devices. Every engineer worth their salt knows that simpler is usually more reliable.
I've been lucky enough to live in basically the same place since the '90s with almost all the same neighbours, and when I'm invited into the houses of my older neighbours almost all of them have the same appliances they've had since the early 2000s. Meanwhile if I go into the houses of more recently moved in neighbours or younger neighbours who had to restock their houses when they moved in, often times when I enter into their houses to talk I notice that there's a new appliance every few months, almost all replaced due to poor performance or failure.
I myself have repaired everything from toasters to microwaves in the last few years as things have aged in my house, and it got me a reputation that has encouraged family members to bring things to me to be fixed. There's a stark difference in how things are made post 2010, and the quality only gets worse post 2020. Often times the cost cutting goes so beyond making manufacturability easier that it makes it impossible to use whatever it is for it's intended purpose for more than a few times.
For example older smoke detectors have the boards on legs where the screws go through them, and for high quality ones the legs have threaded brass inserts so that if you tighten things down after replacing the battery you don't have a chance of stripping the threading. Newer ones the boards just float freely inside the case and are held in by snap clips which become brittle after just a couple of years and break easily, meaning you have to glue the board back in after replacing the battery. Key fobs and remotes often suffer the exact same problem of using plastic snap clips which will break the first time you have to pry the body open to replace the CR2032 battery inside. I've had to buy a new car key specifically because of that. Showerheads use soft compound plastics for the flow rings which break down unlike their older rubber variants, not only clogging some of the showerhead's openings but also failing to function as a flow ring and allowing the full force of the pipe's throughput. Freestanding lamps no longer route the cable through the bottom and attach it via a ring inside the body as a double insulator. Instead often times the cable is just glued into a hole in the side, and if you're lucky there's a rubber ring to cap the hole and act as an insulator. I've gotten shocked from cheap metal desk lamps because of this. Clocks these days are just single chips blobbed onto a cheap board with an induction motor powered by a single AAA battery and three plastic gears to move the hands. Most have as severe a drift as minutes per week which gets worse as the batteries lose charge. Old ones used batteries to periodically wind springs under tension or the 60Hz frequency of the electric grid which would move a gear system at a consistent ratio, keeping drift under a few seconds a month.
Survivorship bias may be real, but even cheap garbage from the '90s is far better built than anything I can buy now that isn't hand made.
Yeah, I did the maths with a heat pump drier and found it would pay for itself in electricity savings in a couple of years. And that was before the cost of electricity in the UK tripled. It uses something like 1/4 of the electricity per load, and because it's unvented all the heat remains in the building envelope.
I have to run my heat pump dryer for about 20-30% longer, though. They seem to just think they can get away with gaslighting you about how long it takes to dry clothes. Even on "extra dry" the clothes often aren't dry.
Similarly, I just installed a hybrid water heater and it is incredible. My kWH usage for hotwater went from 10% monthly bill to just 3% (and the heat pump tank cools/dehumidifies the basement it's within).
Yep. I’ve really had to unfortunately that there are so many things that are very hard to just “throw money at”, unless it’s A LOT of money. Just wrangling someone to come and fix my…whatever…can easily take hours and hours of work, no matter what I’m willing to pay.
After about 3 years my washing machine broke - 3 mins on youtube showed me it was likely the carbon brushes - £5 part from ebay. Took 30 mins to fit once they arrived, and I've had to to the do the job twice more, but now approaching 10 years with the same machine still going strong.
If you want to keep it simple, don't even bother with filtered water and just drink out of the tap. It is safe in the developed world. If you are concerned about germs, which can get through the filter anyway, you should boil the water instead.
That really isn't a good assumption. The West is undergoing a bureaucratic collapse where incompetent or out right maliciously corrupt people are subverting regulators.
I dont trust regulators and have a five stage reverse under the sink filter. Result? In the last five years in my little section of the midwest:
- I've dodged Pb poisoning when my local water authority switched corrosion inhibitors (note, this is after Flint MI)
- I've dodged vinyl chloride poisoning from the Palestine OH fire that Federal regulators pretended was a nothing burger until dead cows started showing up everywhere.
Not to mention the countless times the lines are fixed and the water comes out brown (this is "safe" because it's iron oxide. Except it is only mostly iron oxide plus all the crud that has caked onto the pipes.)
Best case scenario I trust the regulators. Even then F- ups happen and Id rather have a filter I keep myself.
Yes, and it’s a good idea to not trust bottled water as well. You could have some grandpa in Nevada having his own ideas how « Real water » should taste. And then its gets grandfathered and sold at WholeFoods.
You could move to my small village in New Mexico and join the water board. There's about 70 of us on the water system, and we could use more people to help provide oversight. The well itself is about 500 yards from my front door, and the water tank and pump house are right up the hill, I go by them on most morning walks.
> McClintock concluded that the name probably derived from a native place name that sounded like Aleh-zon or Ali-Shonak, which meant “small spring” or “place of the small spring.”
Humans have documented remains close to this village going back 4000 years, and likely were here much longer than that. The creek has (so far, even in the worst drought in 1200 years) never stopped flowing.
> The West is undergoing a bureaucratic collapse where incompetent or out right maliciously corrupt people are subverting regulators.
I don't know where you're getting this from. Generally speaking, regulations and enforcement are tighter than they've ever been. That doesn't mean they're perfect, but you're going to have to show some evidence it's getting worse.
I really don't think you want to go back to the 1970's and 1980's, or the 1940's and 1950's.
I mean, I totally believe you about your water -- I just don't know where you get the idea that it was better in the past. If anything, you as a consumer just didn't have the ability to detect it or filter.
I didn't complain that there aren't enough regulations. I mean that the people involved in them are corrupt and incompetent which makes them easy prey to the industries they regulate.
That's why I didn't say "regulations", I said "regulations and enforcement".
Corruption has generally gone down significantly over the decades, and knowledge and training have gone up.
I'm not saying there aren't problems, but you're presenting a narrative where bureaucracies are "collapsing", when the reality is that things have actually been improving in general, and quite a great deal.
The Royal Society of Chemistry is calling on the UK Government to overhaul its drinking water standards, after new analysis reveals more than a third of water courses tested in England and Wales contain medium or high-risk levels of PFAS, more commonly known as forever chemicals.
I don't know. We have started using Epic Pure filters. They claim to filter PFOA/PFOS [1].
Don't take this as a recommendation though. I have no expertise in this at all and I haven't done any tests to confirm whether Epic's claims are actually true.
Brita filters also have ion exchange resin as well as activated charcoal. However it's not enough to remove PFAS, there was a lawsuit about this, if you do a search.
It's not about germs, it's about the taste -- it's about removing chlorine.
I personally don't like my water to taste like diluted swimming pool. After the first time I tried a blind tasting of tap water vs. Brita-filtered at home, I never drank straight from the tap again.
Haha you've never been to San Francisco. The tap water there is this nasty opaque sludge. It comes out of the faucet looking like bathwater after the bath has been used. Knowing the way things go there, they probably turned their water treatment facilities into Roman style bathhouses that could serve as shelters for the homeless.
That sounds a whole lot like a you problem, presumably due to old pipes in your building or whatever. Most SF water comes from Hetch Hetchy and is clean enough at the source that it's not required to be filtered. My experience over a few decades is that San Francisco's tap water is about the best tasting in the nation.
Only downside with RO is it uses more water, but depending on water quality and cost it is often wirth it. Over on the carbon filter side there is KX media, which does a redox reaction and can kill giardiasis and help with slight contamination. It also does a great job against chlorine but chloramine is harder to filter.
If you live in my corner of the USofA the concept of "wasting" water is meaningless. I actually posed this question to an LA water conservation engineer guy. He didn't know how you could possibly water here.
i don't want my water to have metal taste, so i use filters. if you care about germs, it's easier to drop some silver in the water. boiling uses too much energy
It should be safe, but a lot of areas have aging infrastructure and related problems (think Flint). Other areas mess with the water, in some areas of the UK the water is fluoridated, on paper it's to improve dental health, but a conspiracy theory is that it's cheaper to use humans as cheap filters instead of dispose of excess fluoride in a managed fashion.
Also, "the developed world" is a very polarising statement to make.
Bought a dumb white top-freezer Whirlpool fridge 11 years ago (WRT359). No water dispenser, no ice maker, not even a light in the freezer; temperature and airflow controls were just knobs. The freezer drain line ran inside the back panel and was a PITA to clean, and the butter compartment lid squeaked so loudly that it was physically painful, but otherwise it was solid.
Had no issues until the plastic drain pan cracked while moving the fridge to redo the floors. Rather than deal with the repair (a replacement drip tray alone was $120 shipped) we sold it to an appliance flipper and put the money toward a new one. I was bummed, but when the buyer came to haul off the old one he was pleasantly surprised that it had made it a decade mostly intact.
Replaced it with a dumb white top-freezer Whirlpool fridge (WRT318). Both were about the same price, inflation adjusted, when new (~$650 from Lowe's). It was in stock and installed the next day. Only tech "upgrade" in the new fridge is a membrane button to control the fridge temperature instead of a knob.
When my wife wanted a touchscreen in the kitchen so she could queue up Spotify, I got a refurb last-gen Lenovo Duet chromebook/tablet for $120. The tablet back has a strong magnet for the cover that made it perfect for slapping onto the side of the fridge. We put a pair of used Kantos on top of the fridge and charge the tablet off its USB port; Google Keep also handles the shopping list, Google Voice on functions as our backup phone. 100% of our "smart appliance" needs done and dusted.
All my appliances are mid-century or older. Parts are simple and easily fabricated if necessary. Having a restored 85-year-old refrigerator (compressor and refrigerant still original) in active use, it's amazing how efficient it actually is. It's manual defrost, but doesn't need defrosting all that often either.
Reading about the failing condenser fan and compressor reminded me of these items, worth watching again:
> All my appliances are mid-century or older. Parts are simple and easily fabricated if necessary. Having a restored 85-year-old refrigerator (compressor and refrigerant still original) in active use, it's amazing how efficient it actually is.
I don't think the word efficient means what you think it means.
I’m about to buy all the appliances to a new place in Europe and could use some more horror stories and learn which brands to avoid. So far I’ve been told to stay away from Samsung ovens. Anyone has any regrets on appliances?
About 8 years ago I got my kitchen redone and went all in on IKEA, mostly because others had horrible waiting times. Now remember it's 8 years later so I don't know how much their stuff changed over time but here's how my stuff is doing:
Fridge: still working perfectly, light, temp control, auto-defrost, fans. I think the compressor got a bit louder but that's it.
Dishwasher: still working fine, the upper basket (or whatever that's called) and its rails show some wear ie tilting downward when pulled out. Sometimes the drainage pump sounds a little strange, maybe something's stuck in there.
Stove: induction, still working fine. Unfortunately all the models they had available had touch buttons on top, probably to make it appear modern. They don't work when your finger is wet or greasy, and the whole stove turns off when water spills on any of the buttons and it starts beeping like crazy. For some funny reason, the stove stopped making beeping noises on button presses. I guess when you don't have real buttons you want this as some form of feedback that the press registered, but the beep sounded really cheap like a square wave. It still beeps when you turn it on or off, and when there's water on the buttons.
Oven: working apart from the bottom heating element. It broke about 3 to 4 years ago. Never bothered to replace it, just using hot air mode now.
They all look like simple no-bells-and-whistles appliances, but also not sturdy. I think in all cases I picked one of the cheapest options.
Bonus nerd stuff on the stove: when the beeping-on-button-press still worked, very rarely one of two things happened: a) a button press registered, but no beep was emitted. b) a beep was emitted but nothing happened. I was suspecting that there's something going on like two completely independent sets of wires going to all the buttons, one for actual functionality, the other one just for beeps, like it was bolted on later by a different department or even company. Maybe the original design had it just beep on power on/off and they wired this in after the fact.
I would stay away not necessarily from specific brands, but models and even variants of models.
Case in point: factories producing my mother's washing machine model were located in three different countries. Depending on the country of origin, one important part would be either integrated with a few others or not. In the former case repairs were not worth the cost.
Only way to tell if your particular machine would be repairable was to check the country of origin.
If you can afford it, get Miele or specifically the Bosch models that are made in Germany (many lower-end Bosch models are contracted out to e.g. Turkey, and not quite as good).
Be wary though. Miele started fucking up their value proposition too. Parts may no longer be sold by repairfolk not associated with Miele. That's usually the start of the slide down the quality and repairability scale.
See this message from an independent parts seller:
Exactly - Miele, or Bosch Series 6 or 8 are usually made in Germany with longer warranty. And Siemens(which is just rebranded bosch nowadays, usually with even better finish and longer warranty).
Yes and no. First it should be a German Miele. But in general, new Mieles aren’t as good as old ones. Across the board. Washers, dryers, dishwashers. The only benefit they offer is energy efficiency (at least based on brochures). If I had to buy again, I would opt for second hand refurbished Miele/Bosch/Siemens with at least 10 years of age. Where I live there are lots of second hand shops that even offer warranty.
Our fridge however is Japanese Panasonic. Not a common choice in Europe but it’s been great so far. Zero maintenance. No frost. Has some minimal digital control but we don’t touch it. YMMV.
We are actually quite happy with our Samsung American style fridge. It is about the last model before they went all the way with integrated lcd and wifi etc. It is also pretty energy efficient for a double door fridge/freezer.
Bosch, Siemens, Neff, is all the same brand underneath and there is little difference between the models across years. Just get something that is offline.
I have had Miele appliances forever and have been very happy with them. My current fridge, dishwasher and dryer are both almost 20 years old. The fridge has never had anything wrong with it, nor has the dishwasher, the dryer needed a new thermostat which I replaced myself. I opted for the simplest models that Miele make.
Want to add a story from my parents here: they also are diehard Miele fans, and when their dishwasher broke a few years ago, they went Miele again. Unfortunately it broke six months in. The Miele repair tech came in, asked what program they usually run, and they replied they just turn it on and press start. That meant they always run the ECO mode that's taking ages because it's running at low temp and little water.
The repair guy told them that the thing breaking was their own fault since the manual clearly started you need to run one of the other modes every X cycles if you normally do ECO, otherwise all the internal tubes gunk up. They got a rebate on a new one, but they refused to replace it. I'd been done with Miele at that point, but they just bought a new one. How a company known for quality and engineering can't implement a simple logic that the device would automatically use more water/temperature every X runs, or at least show a warning on the display, is beyond me.
Oh, and the new one, according to my parents at least, occasionally just stops in the middle of the washing cycle and they need to restart it. But I wouldn't rule out that this is some sort of user error. Maybe you just shouldn't go with the model that has a dozen buttons and knobs when you're 80. :)
I've been happy with my Electrolux fridge (it's only seven years old but literally zero maintenance in that time and it's still working like a champ), which I bought because my parents were happy with theirs which they'd bought five or six years before I got mine. Theirs is still going well too.
My washing machine is a Bosch series 8 which has also been really good, same age, no problems.
Seconded. No-Frost freezer compartments since the 80's i think and they are manufactured in Germany actually. Miele's fridges are also whitelabeled Liebherrs
We bought all new appliances for a kitchen remodel about 1.5 years ago, everything pretty nice, mostly LG. Even after this time I am still in love with the LG fridge, glass door, two kinds of ice, middle drawer chill or freeze. It’s pricey but I’ve never marveled over an appliance this much.
My GE dishwasher made it about 4 years and my range hood just under 6(needs a new blower due to spun bearing now and it was never sealed well). Garbage.
But the first year service rate for even high end dishwashers is very high(over 10%!). Got a Bosch and got lucky so far but it still feels like luck..
I have a 10 year old Bosch. A part recently failed. I repaired it myself. During the repair I noticed that this thing was built for repairability. The parts manual is available online. The company seems to take an interest in quality.
I just can’t say the same over the other appliance brands in my house.
Likewise. GE dishwasher got a fault after a couple years and spewed water everywhere. Got a Bosch and never had a problem in about 8 years now. It cleans way better too. Simple, reliable, looks and works great.
I'm not so sure about Miele. I looked at their washer dryers recently and there were a lot of complaints about TwinDos. I would say keep it simple and don't extend to features you wouldn't normally expect just because a manufacturer is offering it.
Bosch - Siemens and Balay are the same builder with three different brands. Seems many times the core elements are the same. Balay is the cheapest, I think Bosch is their top line.
All 3 are quite good, and knowing this you can try to get more bang for your money.
Our ancient basement fridge died. We replaced it with a Best Buy Insignia SKU 6472692. It's currently $500, and we paid $550 plus a bit more to take away the old one. Its primary features include having two doors, staying cold on the bottom, and staying really cold on the top. We love it.
> the combustion engine and hybrid cars are surprisingly reliable
The OP brings up an interesting contradiction: appliances have become less reliable but cars have become more reliable. Cars have become worse in some of the same areas as appliances, like the use of touch screens instead of physical controls, but cars have nevertheless become more mechanically reliable. What would explain this opposite trend?
The reliability of fridges was "Buy it for $300, plug it in, it works continuously for 10 years with no servicing" so the reliability really had nowhere to go but down.
The reliability of cars, on the other hand, used to be pretty awful. Lots of maintenance, regularly needing repair work done - not to mention regular servicing, oil changes and tyre changes. And people replacing their 5-year-old cars because 'old cars just aren't reliable'. So there was a lot of scope for improvement.
Maybe part of it is that there are few enough models of cars that it’s possible to collect reliability data (and people do), and it’s a big enough purchase (and breaking down is annoying enough) that people pay attention to it?
There's a lemon laws for cars in many places, where if it breaks too much you can just return it to dealership for a refund. No such thing for appliances, unfortunately.
We bought a new stove about 6 years ago, basically had to get induction stove top because that was all that was available. I bought one of the more expensive ones.
That stove top broke after a couple months, but luckily we're in Denmark where the warranty is a year, and when something gets repaired like that it's also under warranty for a year (actually sometimes more). We got that stove top replaced about every 4-6 months for 4 years until finally they did a good enough job that it lasted. The repairman said yeah sometimes it's just like that, ha ha.
No monetary cost but every few months you can't cook for a week.
Luckily I also bought a portable non-induction stove with two plates which we use whenever the main stove has problems.
At this point I'm assuming that if an appliance is only providing the bare minimum 2 years warranty (manufacturer warranty, extended store warranty doesn't "count"), then it's crap, and I should look for a more expensive model.
So far that has worked decently well : my kitchen water heater (3 year warranty) is going on nearly a decade and only now is starting to have issues, while the previous one, albeit significantly cheaper (minimum warranty), only lasted half a year.
(One should not underestimate the cost / effort spent dealing with a poorly working / broken tool.)
Cars haven't become more reliable, that's for certain - if you are European, you've encountered your fair set of travesties. Manufacturers, in the pursuit of stringent Euro emission standards, nonsensical regulations, more horsepower, and reduced material and manufacturing costs have put out such a set of scrap-worthy engines. They typically have low displacement, few cylinders, small turbos, exhaust recirculation.
Ford's EcoBoost and Peugeot's Puretech engines come to mind in particular, with the latter being so bad, that they tend to fail well before 100k km, and there's an active investigation going on about it by European Commission.
There are fewer car models, and people tend to do more research before buying a car than a fridge. That means that if a model gets a reputation for being unreliable, it actually costs the manufacturer lost sales.
This is something I’ve specifically noticed in relation to televisions. Televisions used to be primarily hardware-driven. The functions worked reliably even if they were limited. Then things changed so that televisions are now primarily software-driven, but the software still seems to be written by developers working in the hardware industry, not the software industry. They have terrible quality problems.
Before, it didn’t matter because the feature set was so limited that software bugs were make or break. If you can’t decode a signal or change a channel, it’s not getting shipped. But now, where there’s an entire OS, GUI, applications, network access, etc.? Now there are vast areas where a million mistakes can be made and shipped. The software industry is (relatively) well-equipped to deal with this. The hardware industry is not. So they ship garbage quality over and over again.
That’s not even covering the perverse incentives vendors have to make their products cheaper and make up for it with spying, adverts, etc. That just compounds the problem.
The descent into feature laden, landfill destined shite is a seemingly universal trend. It's the same across appliances, TV's, computers and wider 'consumer tech' and extends to cars, footwear, and (at least in Australia) homes.
Minmax'ing cost and marketable shiny features over literally every measure of quality, usability, repairability, and longevity is abhorrent. It's an accelerating arms race to the bottom.
I can only hope we reach point where the market segments and opens space (with sufficient demand) so that more people and companies can focus on making sane, well designed, simple things again.
It's increasingly difficult to get high-end performance with a simple device with a good user interface.
Incidentally, I happen to have almost the same refrigerator as the author (same thing, but without the hot water dispenser). My only failure so far has been the condenser fan after seven years of operation. It was clearly an electronic failure of the onboard motor controller, which honestly has no excuse to fail.
I also have a more-recent Kitchenaid 48-inch-wide side-by-side purchased in 2020. It's a remarkably simple appliance given the year of manufacture. Yet the interior lighting is horribly unreliable. The freezer killed three lighting modules in its first three years. They inevitably go high impedance, usually emitting zero light. One of the three was still emitting a tiny amount of light post-failure. The lights are all in series, so when one fails the entire chamber goes dark. I've even had one of the replacement lighting modules fail already. This component is clearly flawed and I'm tempted to design my own replacement.
> It's increasingly difficult to get high-end performance with a simple device with a good user interface.
It's actually not at all, but people [in general, not here] want Cheap + Features. There are expensive "prosumer/consumer" level no-feature refrigerators but people don't want to pay for them.
Are there particular brands or manufacturers that you look to for this quality, or do you look more to the price or “commercial-grade” positioning as a signal?
You need to do your research. Because a manufacturer/brand can make one product (sometimes just one item in a lineup) very well, but the rest of the products not so much. So a well designed kitchen with "prosumer" appliances will be a mix/match from a bunch of different brands.
I've stated earlier here that I've had Sub Zero refrigerators last 10-15+ years with mostly no maintenance, however you will spend around $7k at the low end. For kitchen appliances talk to chefs who work with these brands daily or read around their forums.
Most people don't want to do this or will vote with their wallet by buying something cheap that needs replacing in ~5 years.
After our fancy fridge died, we purchased a “dumb” Mitsubishi Electric WX Series fridge. No LCD panels, no wifi, no time.
It’s tiny at only 470L, however it’s designed for maximum storage in small Japanese apartments, so we can fit heaps of groceries and frozens. It also has a chilled compartment specifically for sushi meat!
Pretty sure it’s a real error message. I believe it’s a comment system implemented by piggybacking onto GitHub issues, and GH API rate limiting can get aggressive fast.
The old Kenmore was probably built by Whirlpool in a US factory. GE cafe is a rebranded Haier fridge from a Chinese factory.
We bought a Samsung (would have preferred LG) fridge 4 years ago and have not needed a single repair. But it is pretty bare bones — French door and in freezer ice maker — no water dispenser or door controls.
I've done more than my fair share of washer repair over the years. I have benefited from Whirlpool reusing the same basic design in a half-a-dozen brands and 40 years. There are some minor differences in the last washer we had and the current one, but it's basically the same wash basin, the same agitator, the same gearing system. I've watched enough videos on youtube that have taught me the ins and outs of that machine. I don't want it to have any more features. I just hope they don't stop making parts for it.
My oven on the other hand - it's a GE Cafe slide-in dual-oven. I'm very happy with it. And I know how much people here rail against it, but I like being able to preheat it, turn it off remotely. Of course, baking is a hobby for me, so I wanted the extra oven.
I have a Whirldpool that quits cooling about every three years. I've fixed it each time. The problem is a inverter/frequency shifter keeps burning out. The compressor, an Embraco, is a 230 vac, 3 phase requires a inverter to convert 120VAC single phase to three phase 230VAC. The inverter does double duty as a frequency shifter to control the speed of the compressor while keeping the voltage constant. After the third time it burned out I plugged the refrigerator into a large surge protector. It has since died again. The other refrigerator from the early 90s is still working without any problems. The amount of energy the three phase compressor saved was more than canceled out by the cost of the parts to repair it
It's very fun to get angry at appliance makers - but if they actually made the appliances that we think they should, they would go broke because nobody (except a few of us) would buy them. This is how these newer "smart" appliances started taking over in the first place.
As evidence, check out some of the manufacturers that do make higher-quality dumb appliances, like Subzero and Speed Queen and notice how little consumer market share they have. Of course they are more expensive, but that's where the supply and demand curve cross. But where people like business owners WILL pay more for quality and longevity, they do have a major share of the commercial market.
That sounds like an argument in favour of[0] centralised planned manufacturing — we can't get good stuff, because short-lived shiny products outcompete boring high quality products.
[0] this doesn't mean it's a sufficient, let alone universally applicable, argument in favour; I'm well aware of many examples of central planning failures.
I suspect the manufacturers get stuck in the race to the bottom. Customers want to spend as little as possible, but that makes it hard to choose one low-end device over the other. So they add features that cost very little but attract attention -- even if they make the actual experience worse.
Right. People seem to not want inflation to apply to appliances.
E.g. a decent toaster in 1984 in the UK was about £18. That's £72 now. Only posh people spend £72 on a toaster. Most people I imagine want to pay no more than £40.
Microwaves were around £200. That's £805 now. Nobody is spending £800 on a microwave.
Don't forget though that that toaster may have been made by people being paid a living wage, maybe even in the UK, and probably in the tens-hundreds of thousands, not millions of units produced as cheaply as possible by slave labor.
For the most part I agree with this, over engineered feature creep is really just horrible stuff. I never need a fridge with wifi and I absolutely swear that that anything more than auto-off is a waste in a coffee machine.
But I think the "Other appliance anecdotes" part suggests that the author has very different requirements than I do. I grew up without a garbage disposal, but its a huge convenience to have one. Also I've had top loader washing machines that don't have easy access to the trap, gimme easy access to the trap ANY DAY and I don't care how its loaded.
On the garbage disposal, I've heard that water treatment facility managers hate them (or at least one does), because it encourages people to put through food waste.
I've also heard landlords say garbage disposals are a net-negative for maintenance visits: disposal-related problems are more costly than the occasional clog because someone put down something the disposal would've stopped.
Also, in multi-tenant buildings, disposals can be a nightmare. Too many people with varying folk wisdom of what's good to put down it. Some people create blockages for the entire stack or more, which ends up causing powered backflows of nasty wastewater into some units. And then what eventually gets snaked out of the drain, and dragged across their kitchens... mere bleach will never get that sufficiently clean. (Even after 3 of these kitchen-apocalypse episodes, you just can't get some people to understand that they can't keep grinding orange peels in their disposal to freshen the air, even when the rot of previous orange peels in the increasing blockage they created might be the reason they want to freshen the air now.)
I try to tell people that pretty much only water and dish soap should go down the drain, and that one of those few-dollar mesh drain strainers is a great tool to help follow this rule. (Also, a container for collecting most of the grease/oil that would otherwise go down the drain.)
> garbage disposal ... encourages people to put through food waste
That's like saying bicycles encourage people to ride bicycles. It's supposed to encourage it. That's the literal purpose of a garbage disposal unit: "a device that shreds food waste into pieces small enough—generally less than 2 mm (0.079 in) in diameter—to pass through plumbing."[1]
> Some people create blockages for the entire stack or more
I don't know how that could happen since if you put something into a garbage disposal unit that can't be shredded to tiny particles, then it's the garbage disposal unit itself that will get clogged, not the pipes or drains. Whatever gets through the garbage disposal unit is going to be less than 2mm in size, and generally much smaller and liquified. If you're referring to oil or grease buildup in pipes, that is irrelevant to the use of a garbage disposal unit since people can and do pour oil or grease down the drain whether they have a garbage disposal unit or not.
In my opinion, a garbage disposal unit is an under-appreciated and supremely useful kitchen appliance, and extremely environmentally friendly (see the brief Wikipedia explanation[2]).
I have repeated, traumatic, first-hand experience with this: food waste accumulates in building pipe bends and joints and such, causing blockages and follow-on effects worse than one would guess.
And the disposal, and myths about what's good to put down the pipes, means a lot of people put that food waste down there.
I don't know the original reason for the adoption of disposals, but smells like it could be corporate lobbying to create a market for a product:
> In many cities in the United States in the 1930s and the 1940s, the municipal sewage system had regulations prohibiting placing food waste (garbage) into the system.[5] InSinkErator spent considerable effort, and was highly successful in convincing many localities to rescind these prohibitions.[6]
It sounds more like OP didn’t do research on which brands and models are good/reliable.
On top of that, with scratch and dent, you do get what you pay for at some point. If an appliance is visibly damaged you don’t know what happened to it: could have been dropped, hit with a truck, returned due to problems/abuse, etc. When physical damage is involved you don’t know if it can exacerbate a design weakness, loosen some screws, whatever you might dream up.
I get it, a lot of appliances are cheap shit that aren’t “built like they used to.” But also, nobody twisted OP’s arm to buy a fridge with an LCD touch screen.
Here’s another thing: good, built-to-last-decades appliances exist and just cost a lot because that’s what they cost to produce. We can’t really blame appliance manufacturers for either the decline of American purchasing power and/or the change in consumer preferences toward shopping on price and nothing else.
You can buy a tank of a washing machine like a Speed Queen but you also get into it knowing you’re paying three or four times the cost of an equivalent shit box. And here’s the thing, if the shit box goes for 6 years without repair/replacement and the Speed Queen lasts 20, congratulations, the shit box wins on TCO. On top of that, your money can sit in your bank account or be used for something else instead of being paid up front for the appliance.
It’s the same deal with refrigerators like Sub-Zero. I talked to an appliance technician who told me all the luxury brands are less reliable, but I think the more accurate statement is that customers don’t call for repairs and blow money on labor costs for their cheap refrigerators, they just buy a new one. When you look at Sub-Zero and similar offerings, they mostly eschew gimmicks, often not even bothering with a water dispenser and going with a basic ice machine instead.
They’re not universally good, because there are shit brands in that space too (like Viking), but you’ve got a lot more quality options at that price point.
I think one solution to the situation of disposable goods might be a disposal tax that the manufacturer and customer share half and half. Or, improve warranty laws for product categories that should last longer. Nobody’s going to make a shitty fridge if you make a 10 year warranty mandatory.
This was my takeaway from the article as well. The author bought a cheap refrigerator, then bought another cheap refrigerator when it broke. He's acting like durability is what he cares about the most, but it sure seems like price is the variable he's optimizing for, with predictable results.
Ceiling fans that can only be controlled using a remote. No way to wire at switch.
I am very much into local home automation, that is where no internet connection is required or allowed (HomeAssistant anyone?).
One thing I always watch out for is the automation must allow manual interaction. These fans have no pull chains, or switches when the remote breaks or more likely get lost.
I'm in the process of replacing the remote+canopy module in my hands with Lutron controls. With those you can control from both the wall and the remote.
I first felt impressed by the note taking, but the more I read, the more I felt it is not very keeping it simple. Thinking back in some shitty fridges we’ve had, I have a good feeling about which ones were shit and which were good. I don’t need to keep notes on this.
For other parts of life this is great though: keeping track of what is going one with some friends I don’t often see or distant relatives.
If you read this and thought, "I wish I knew where to buy a good xyz" I recommend you check out Ben's Appliances and Junk on youtube and the BIFL (Buy It For Life) subreddit. Both have helped me.
It often seems impossible to buy things that are quality or free of extraneous features no matter what you are willing to pay. It's frustrating.
He seems to note that the fridge is french-door a hell of a lot, does this actually impact the cooling mechanics, making them more complicated and prone to break? Or is it just a coincidence all of the overly complicated fridges happen to be french door because they look "fancier"? Fridge experts please weigh in.
Appliance makers could build the simplest possible appliance, then build a simple monitoring system (like OBD2 in cars) to tell us what is wrong. They could even agree on a standard interface so anyone with a computer or phone can see the live data and diagnose bad sensors. They could make that OBD2-like system relatively secure by having it only sense and report without being able to make adjustments or screw things up. They could make it so you can tell the appliance to ignore a bad sensor, so we do not get OBD2-like problems where bad sensors are more common and more expensive than real problems.
Nobody has done it, yet.
I have hope for the Chinese to figure this out and create a national standard.
...and power inefficient. The metrics are just not the same as those for home use.
Also, like military hardware, industrial appliances rely on a long chain of logistics to keep going. They generally will however degrade more gracefully and be easier to maintain - because they're designed to be maintained.
My fridge is not pretty, but it has been running for 20 years straight with the only hiccups being power outages.
I really do not expect that a newer fridge will last as long. I may try and find something in brushed aluminum off Craigslist which has been sitting in someone's garage since 2000 when this one eventually goes.
I have an aunt who has had a fridge running without issues since about 1962. It is all white ceramic over stainless steel and a thing of beauty.
This is the kind of product engineering modern companies seek to avoid.
I seem to recall a Heinlein novel about inter-dimensional travelers who wanted to take over the world by destroying the economy. The first thing they did was found companies which made products which never wore out (razors and cars).
Real world control systems need to be able to scale up and down. Our financial and corporate systems only know how to scale up, middle along, or fail catastrophically. There is no mechanism in the world of capital and corporations for scaling something down gracefully if a market is mostly saturated but we still need some of something.
One solution could be to side step the issue by getting really good at flexible just in time manufacturing. This lets you decouple the company from products. When someone needs a fridge, a fridge is made. The companies running the factories could be big build to order companies that could make a huge variety of things and the plans could be for sale by “fabless” appliance companies or open source.
This is sort of how chip and electronic parts manufacture works.
In this model making something with a really long life span is fine. You might run low on fridge orders, but that just means your factories are free to make e-bikes or server racks or heat pumps or whatever the thing with demand happens to be.
We're heading this direction. There's a number of industries which technology has enabled them to move closer (or completely into) a manufacture-on-demand model where it's economically feasible to have small production runs (sometimes of even a single unit).
T-Shirts are probably the first one I am aware of which got there. But strangely enough, Guitars are moving that way. It used to be to get a signature series you had to be a pretty big artist. These days, there's players from cover bands getting signature series! You look through all the lists of signature series guitars, and quite a lot of them have been released in just the last ~12 years. PCB's are going there now too - I've read on HN itself hobbyists talking about how cheap it is to get individual custom boards printed for them for projects shipped from China. Manufacturers taking production runs of less than 100, and happy to do it.
It's worth noting - production on demand doesn't provide any guarantee that the products will have good longevity. In fact, many printed-on-demand T-Shirts are pretty crap and you end up tossing them after a couple years.
There are still simple models. I got a whirlpool about 2 years back. All it has is a water dispenser and an ice maker on the inside. Other than that it's the same as my late 80s Frigidaire. Still seems to be mostly mechanical.
It's a lot more efficient than my old fridge though and a lot bigger. The old one had issues with it's design and defrosting as well that the new one has fixed esp being a lower cold drawere model vs the old one with freezer on top. I can't block the vents on the new one and they can't freeze up, but it does use a blower. The old one could ice over the vent and I had to modify it with a extra passive heating wire to keep it from freezing up.
They may run, but the power consumption your old fridge freezers are wasting would cover multiple brand new fridges many times over.
Anything over 10 years really should be replaced.
A bit like leds vs incandescent at this point time. Especially problematic given a fridge freezer runs 24/7 and is the largest contributor to your energy bills.
Also isn’t this a classic example of old things that survive are likely more expensive and well made. However, the cheap stuff back then likely got replaced sooner. Probably a similar thing applies where an expensive modern fridge will last ages too.
Modern appliances use a very low viscosity oil in the compressor pump, and as a result use less power, but also wear faster. The old ones use a much more viscous oil which gives decades of use at the expense of higher power consumption.
There has to be ways to make the more efficient models more reliable. There’s just little incentive since units failing keeps the orders coming. You want the unit to last the warranty duration plus one minute.
WRT washers/dryers it makes more sense to buy a refurbished one from Craigslist. There are folks who buy and fix old units as a side hustle and the ones I’ve bought from them are wayyy cheaper and run so much better than any newer unit I’ve owned.
Yeah my current washing machine is a refurbished old school top loader. Easy to install, wash cycle is 45 min, gets clothes super clean. It's definitely not water efficient but at least it doesn't take 3 hours to actually clean your clothes. Who's got time for that? I can get 6 loads of laundry done leisurely on a Sunday.
I had a Sears Admiral refrigerator that was built in the 90s which recently (three months ago) had the compressor go out. I've had the refrigerator since I purchased the house in 2001 and I have performed zero maintenance on it, so it was no surprise that the... uh... solid dust build up finally wore out the compressor fan. Though my wife and I did purchase a new refrigerator I intend to replace the compressor in the Admiral because >25 years is a good run and I expect the resurrected refrigerator [when I get around to resurrecting it] will outlast the new one.
I've never hooked up water lines for ice makers for my refrigerators, including refrigerators at my other properties. Call it a hunch.
I purchased a separate dispenser that takes 5 gallon drums of water. I strongly prefer the extra space over the convenience of water in the fridge door.
Mine's an LG, we've had it for roughly 10 years now and never had a problem with it. But we don't even use the icemaker in it (we have a separate ice maker as well).
When I bought my house I also asked to keep the old (circa early 2000) appliances. They are stupid simple, reliable, and have no extra features or wifi. Meanwhile the last place I rented had a brand new fridge that broke twice in 6 months..
My first home (~2010) had no fridge so I bought a new Samsung it was about $3k, nothing smart about it, it just looked nice and had a freezer at bottom and an ice dispenser on the door. Within the next 3-5 years I had spent another $3-5k on repairs and eventual replacement with another similar looking/capable fridge by another similar manufacturer. It followed same similar timeline to its end. The ROI and reduced hassle factor of just buying a Subzero made sense for me on the third fridge. I know several people that have 30 year old ones that just don’t fail. So far so good but we’ll see how it lasts.
Ice dispenser in the door is apparently a huge risk factor for fridge failure. The ice making machinery either being in the non-frozen section, and/or having some mechanical components passing through the insulating door, makes it struggle. People love it, but bad idea.
The fridge that was in my house when I bought it (recently) has an ice maker fully contained in the freezer at the bottom, you have to open the freezer section fully to get at it. Apparently that can work fine.
Yeah I agree, when I bought the subzero they didn’t even offer ice in the door on any models. Likely to maintain their reputation of low maintenance
Unfortunately in my house the kitchen appliances are on display and so “need” to look nice. If I were to build a custom house, I’d just hide all the appliances and buy the $500 basic white fridge like I have in my garage.
My fridge craps ice and I never again want one that doesn't. It eliminates faffing with trays/bags (or buying the stuff) and ensures you'll never go to make a G&T and discover, horror of horrors, you're out of ice.
I need my fridge to connect to the internet about as much as I need my oven to operate as a fax machine, though.
The two reasons I never want an ice-dispenser, is that one, it's rediculously expensive. I would never pay hundreds of euro's for a standalone machine that makes ice: for that price I'll gladly keep fiddling with trays in the freezer or just drink my drinks without ice. Why pay that markup when it's embedded?
And second, it's the single point of failure of the entire fridge. Everything else, from the rubbers to the pump will last longer and be easily repairable. I'm convinced it's mainly there because producers of fridges know it obsoletes the entire fridge faster. That without these fragile "addons" the machine might just last for years or decades. During which this family does not buy a new one.
Why pay the markup? Because I'm willing to pay it for the benefits it provides. Not everybody values things the same. You prefer to save the money, I prefer not to drink iceless G&Ts like some sort of savage. Economics at work.
It's not an SPF as the rest of the fridge doesn't rely on it to operate. Ours broke down last year (after about 14 years of continuous operation in a hard water area). The fridge continued to work fine and after about a month we had the ice maker replaced.
We have a fancy Samsung fridge with display. I was livid the first day I woke up and entered the kitchen and there was a full screen ad on the display greeting me pre-coffee.
I vowed to never buy another fancy appliance again and took it off the WiFi network.
i don't understand why people buy smart devices. with anything smart i can't know what exactly the device is doing. plus the software will most likely stop being supported. by then it is just a potential tool to being hacked
My wife really wanted the live calendar display on the fridge, which was useful.
It was on an isolated WiFi network so it couldn’t communicate with any other devices in the house, but I didn’t count on ads being served directly on a $3000 device.
I am only on my first fridge from 2014. It’s a Samsung French door with freezer on bottom. I’ve replaced the mother board, the ice maker, applied silicone sealant to the ice maker housing, and installed a drain heater in the main coil compartment to augment the defrost heater (saw this on you tube to prevent ice over). After all this, it’s been working fine for a couple years. Hope I don’t have to buy another fridge for a long time.
Timely read; we’re in the process of replacing our $12k Thermador refrigerator 4 years after we bought it, and 6 months and a dozen trips by the repair guy.
I do not consider myself a Luddite, but the more I hear stories like that the more I feel validated in my "do not rely on anything that I can not fix it myself" principle.
We are past the point where you can not buy a "dumb TV" anymore or to do so you need to pay an absurd premium. The next in line are our home appliances. Your fridge, your vacuum cleaner, your clothes iron... everything will be built in a way that makes you dependent on the vendor.
I know it is easy and tempting to blame "late-stage capitalism" and corporations' endless appetite for growth bringing up Planned Obsolescence, but have we really made ourselves so helpless that we are unable to say "no, I refuse to accept this crap you are offering me"?
Almost 10 years ago - when I bought our current 50" TV - one reason was that large computer screens were unaffordable, bad to look at from angles, or both. I recently checked, and seems nowadays you'd be able to get decently large 4k-screens at similar cost than a TV. Just add a PC or whatever media players you want.
Widgets like fridges need to be minimalist as the manufacturers are all incompetent. Less tech means less things to break. No French doors and no ice makers. Always problems right there. The only thing you guarantee with a fridge is more hassle as the complexity of its design increases. These things are NOT built for reliability but are designed as the original subscription model: regular repairs.
Radical Idea: "Landfill" taxes on appliances. Manufacturers of basic, last-forever stuff pay ~0%. Manufacturers of breakdown-o-matic junk can end up paying 100%. And the ability to pay has to be backed by tightly-regulated insurance policies - so CrapCo can't just vanish into corporate shell games or bankruptcy when the tax man comes knocking.
Buy appliances at costco, max out the extended warranty. You get 5 or 6 years of warranty. Some devices will last 20 years, others will fail multiple times under warranty, and eventually be replaced as a lemon, under warranty. It gets you out of the bathtub curve and you don't have to have a part time job repairing appliances.
I have only bought small things like a kettle since the "smartening" of household items started, and every time it feels like navigating a mine field of planned obscolescence. But I guess it is good motivation to give my current old and trusty appliances more TLC.
Some people argue it's just incompetence, not PO. But if you've been in the business of making the same type of hardware/appliances for more than a few years then it's definitely planned obsolescence.
Whenever I have to buy a microwave oven, I always choose the ones with the simplest user interface possible: Two knobs, one for the timer, one for the intensity. They have served my parents and myself well.
I am also a proponent of this idea. I bought a Sharp R21LCF microwave last year - it’s a commercial microwave and the single control is a dial to set the time. It’s great!
Tried reading the article, but couldn't figure out what's the difference between side by side and french style. Tried looking online but it didn't help me either
Companies creating quality are stupid. Making devices that break sells much better and consumers outside of Japan are stupid/overwhelmed/feature dazzled enough they don't really care. Also, everyone (outside japan) does it, so they don't have a choice.
I don't quite understand why the author didn't stick with with Maytag since his washer is still going strong? My family owned a couple of Maytags growing up and I thought it was a budget brand. But recently, I used the Maytag "commercial" washer, dryer, and dishwasher. I was really impressed and follows the KISS mentality closely. No frills, just works.
Why is the following timeline counterfactual (as far as I know) for basically all household appliances:
1. it was invented
2. it was commercialized
3. some decades of varying modes of specialization, advancement, innovation
4. reach technological maturity/saturation
5. open source designs with idiot-proof manuals emerge
6. everyone uses the open source versions
7. maybe a freelancer market emerges
8. it's no longer commercially viable
9. it becomes a near-zero-cost improvement on the baseline human condition
10. focus on new technology
The hopeful view (IMO) is that we're just at a point historically where things like washing machines and refrigerators are still at step 4 and people like me are starting to wonder why we're not further down the road? In 10-20 years maybe we'll be at 6 or 7?
The cynical view (IMO) is that the capitalist system operates by pulling a bait and switch on the average consumer. As technology becomes commercially viable, we use the slack it creates to pump everyone full of skittles and pretty little liars and then sell refrigerator-television-vending-machine appliances until the Decadent Society collapses under its own weight.
Maybe a more moderate view (IMO) is that it's naive to think that everyone could possibly have the time or desire to maintain their own refrigerators? FWIW My take on this particular view is that we should be trying to develop a society where it's not naive, where the average human stands on top of centuries of innovation rather than cocooned inside of it.
