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Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

My new Samsung washing machine started leaking water onto my floor within a couple years of purchase. At least the Wi-Fi still worked.

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> At least the Wi-Fi still worked.

Did it at least send you a message that it was leaking? Heh.

I'm a big proponent of 'dumb appliances'. The less they do, the better. All this IoT-ification of everything is madness. It just introduces points of failure, attack surfaces and privacy intrusions for no benefit for the consumer whatsoever. Oh, and they're nearly impossible to repair because everything's DRMed and microcontrollers actively prevent you from fixing things with 'unauthorized parts'.

My household still has 15 year old Maytag appliances that still work perfectly and have no DRM in them. I plan on fixing them until the day I die because I really don't want to deal with this new mess.

I remember reading an article about point and shoot cameras becoming popular because most users don't adjust any settings away from defaults. I feel like appliances are the same. Ours have a ton of options on them, but only a few are used. I could literally use a washer with cold/warm/hot and that's it.

I could not agree more. I hope a market for brainless appliances remains far into the future. I would personally pay far more for appliances that have no DRM, no data collection, no intelligence of any kind.

> The less they do, the better

You are g’damned right. I like purpose-built, high quality things/tools that do one thing perfectly. TVs are another example or where this goes wrong. Irons, toasters, blenders, microwaves — all products that I will happily spend more money for the fewer features they have.

I was surprised that Samsung was not on the list. It must be that Samsung is not popular in Canada.

We bought the Samsung washer because it was highly rated by Consumer Reports. Boo on Consumer Reports.

Our washer was defective from the factory. It had a deformed part that leaked water on the floor. Luckily we purchased the extra warranty. Unluckily Samsung was giving us the run around about fixing the washer. We even said that we would make the repair if they sent us the part. Boo on Samsung.

Finally the store that sold us the washer replaced it and sent the defective washer back to Samsung. I wish I could praise the store (Western Appliance) - but they are sadly going out of business.

CR ranks Samsung pretty low for overall appliance reliability.

Part of the problem seems to be that nobody makes highly-reliable front-loading washers for home use.

https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/who-makes-the-mos...

I still remember that Samsung fridge that lasted 2 years. 1000€. Amazing.

I see it ranked 5th in OP

I had this issue. in my case it was due to clogged up drainage. once I cleaned it out, especially around the door seal, the leaking stopped.

Our Samsung fridge's drip pan gets frozen up every couple of years and has to be defrosted or water starts collecting in the meat and vegetable drawers. They apparently used a metal heat conducting rod that was a little too short to work properly.

But sadly, no WiFi to fall back on :(

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