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Comment by sparkywolf | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if you can get one official one and cut out the rfid chip, install it permanently in the fridge

You can order a bypass filter from GE (they are free). Cut the RFID from it and tape it to your fridge in the right spot and it will never complain about the filter again.

The only downside is that when you dispense water it lights up a little sign that says "water is not filtered".

I do this and buy cheap aftermarket filters from Amazon.

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/hack-rwpfe-water-filters-ge...

I put a piece of black tape over the filter light on my refrigerator. (It's not a GE.)

You can probably find some tape that matches the color nicely on Amazon for a very small amount of money.

I have a whole-home water filter, and fill up a jug from the tap that sits inside my fridge until I'm thirsty.

I have never understood why people take extra steps, have extra inconvenience, and have more expensive, harder to replace items just for the sake of saving, what, fifteen seconds filling up a pitcher?

Fifteen seconds 1500 times stops being negligible.

And it is more convenient in multiple ways. Also you don't mess up the nice cold air in the fridge.

It's a tradeoff but it's not a lopsided one.

I think the problem is that you shouldn't have to. It's pretty anticonsumer all the way around.

Everybody wants to sell razor blades these days.

Unless the fridge remembers the IDs of each filter, and won't let you reuse the same ID after 3 months (or whatever the service life is of a water filter).

Maybe disabling the RFID reader hardware will make the fridge bypass the lockout code?

The easier solution is just not buy a GE fridge, but the general public won't be aware of the need for that solution.

or factory reset the fridge

This is an amazing sentence to read.

I got new appliances a few years ago and luckily it was pretty easy to get "dumb" appliances. I really hope that is still true next time I need to get new appliances.

Or GE patches in a "fix" to prevent these hackarounds.

I hate this future where I need to prevent a company from updating my wifi enabled fridge so I can get clean drinking water. Oh what a world.

Unless it's able to read it from the paper I magnet to its face, there's no why I'd ever tell my fridge my wifi password.

Yeah, except that who decides if the filter is finished? Perhaps the 'smart' fridge will note that this filter has been used for NN litres and therefore must be replaced...

There's a bypass cartridge included with the fridge, whose RFID can be attached to a generic filter. (I found that out in a reply in the linked thread.)

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