Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy
automaticwasher.org
automaticwasher.org
I've been seeing this as a common issue throughout most of the household appliances we've tried to buy in the last ten years. They just don't last.
The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.
If your complaint is that this requires effort from the consumer, then that’s not something any market could fix. The consumer will always have to consider what their preferences are and how the offerings in the market align with them, if the want to end up purchasing goods/services that align with their preferences.
Household appliances are textbook examples of adoption s-curves, and in different phases, different rules apply for the market. Especially in the last phase of the s-curve, those manufacturers are hurt the most which build lasting products, because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product. So they either go bankrupt or get bought by one of the manufacturers that put in planned obsolescence and got tons of money from that, or they change their strategy before that happens.
That complaint is immature and entirely self-interested. It’s almost always beneficial (except when there’s production shortages) to have a preference that is shared by large segments of the market. It’s not the systems fault if few people share your preferences.
That's a bit rich for you to write -> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods, and your post is a theoretical, spherical car in a vacuum description of how ideal market should work, and falls apart in the real world.
If the model worked perfectly, we would never have problems with slave labour in supply chains because ~0% of consumers are willing to buy them. The fact that we do, indicated that consumers are not able to enforce their preferences, for example because companies lie with no consequences. And if they can lie about slave labour, then they can lie about anything else.
The problem of selecting for quality is exactly what I am talking about, and it is very simple to accomplish. I do it myself routinely, so I know that it takes a bit more than 0 effort, but it is a very simple problem to manage, and anybody can do it. The actual immature complaint is that not enough people have the same preferences as you do. Which you just have to get over, and accept that you live on a planet with 7 billion other people, and a lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV.
So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?
What is the basis for this extraordinary claim?
So far your argument reads a lot like 'market is infalliable, if it doeant serve your needs, its your fault. And even if you find it ever fails, it's your, the consumers fault too. No flaw in the system is possible'
I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
You still have not addressed how does this square with lying.
What should happen when I ask primark staff and they say 'there is no slave labour'?
Is it also my responsibility to fly to Taiwan, break into the factory and defeat their security in a shootout, to find out that thwy use slave labour?
At least I hope the state won't protect primarc in case I want to make sure they are not lying before I buy a t-shirt?
That’s just regular fraud. It’s already illegal.
Given you don't have details on the quality of the item you are buying how do you accomplish that?
Doesn't this neglect word of mouth? If you ask someone on HN, they will tell you to buy your vacuum cleaners and dishwashers from Miele and your washers and dryers from Speed Queen, budget permitting.
To the extent that scales to the world at large, the quality manufacturers will take business away from their competitors who don't get recommended as often.
Consumers signal their preference for quality all the time. By buying the pricier stuff. But sometimes, somehow, there's no option anymore to buy X stuff - try buying a desktop CPU without Intel ME or AMD PSP for example. They just put it in every one of the CPUs at one point and that was that. People are not going to not buy newer CPUs.
We just need a kitchenware company that takes the quality mantle and seriously maintains it over the course of 40 years. I bet it’s a niche that would actually work if someone tried it. You just have to keep the MBAs out of the company somehow.
I totally support your mission. I'm writing this on an 8-year-old Mac that I hope to eke out a full decade from. I just don't think iPhones (or Macs, really -- mine already can't run the newest OS, and its Safari can't display WebP images that are popping up increasingly across the Web) are a good example.
I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.
Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.
Nobody makes high quality cassette tape mechanisms. It doesn't make sense to make ten of a custom cassette tape mechanism, only at least tens of thousands, so, they don't. But the market for thousands of these mechanisms is for the cheapest possible not good quality. So you simply can't buy good quality.
It was possible in the 1980s, at great expense, for the humble cassette tape to sound pretty good, the Nakamichi Dragon is the most famous high end tape deck.
But you can't do that today. There are a handful of Chinese manufacturers, spitting out variations on the same basic cheapest possible "eh, it's good enough" mechanism and that's the entire market.
I wonder if the reverse could be done-- using the heads that are still (likely) in production for use in card readers, then using some DSP magic to reconstruct a decent audio product?
No thermostatic control, but the defaults are fine for my uses.
Currently on year 10. The power button got a little finicky so I have to wedge it with a piece of cardboard to make contact, but otherwise as good as the day I bought it.
"The market" is not a single thing. It's an idea(ology) from economics, and a cultural mythology, that vaguely intersect at some point.
We all think we know what "The Market" is, supply, demand, competition and so on. It's existence and operation underwrites many a political argument.
Then there is the reality:
Walk in to a supermarket and "choose" from 20 different brands of tinned vegetable, grown in the same region, processed in a handful of factories ultimately owned by the same parent company.
"Own" a movie, on a device that you don't actually control in any way, that you were effectively forced to purchase, with money you don't have.
And so on....
So, in respectful mockery of Thatcher I say "There's no such thing as The Market" - not because I don't believe in the values of property, choice, competition, innovation.... but because we don't have these, and haven't for some time. The myth of "The Market" lives on the place of early (real) capitalism as we head toward "consumer communism".
There is no need to do anything "respectfully" of Thatcher. She should have been hanged.
I wouldn't piss on her grave for fear the warmth would comfort her.
>"The market" is not a single thing.
Who seriously think it is? I think most people here knows that "the market" doesn't refer to an actual thing or place, just like "the internet" doesn't refer to an actual actual thing or place.
Nobody. I'm not implying anyone is that stupid. It's obviously a figure of speech. Which you get, right?
For your supermarket example, instead of going there you could go to a local farmer's market for those vegetables. It might cost more, but most expect higher quality there than at the supermarket. So there is another "market" option, you shouldn't just expect all your "market" options to be placed in convenient aisles at the grocery store.
If you live in the city and have to drive over an hour to get to a farmer's market, well that was also a choice you made. Perhaps you didn't make that choice because you wanted to be away from locally grown produce, but the supermarket being your only option is a consequence of that choice.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to point out that much of the choices we make will reduce the other choices we have and we should be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market.
Nicely put. I see that sort of "choice affecting choices" you describe leveraged/manipulated a lot in tech, to "funnel" people into worlds with ever smaller horizons. Every product has an inbuilt con or trick that seems out to get you. It's essence is anti-choice masquerading as forms of economic freedom.
How to remain conscious of that? It's tiring. Like being in a jungle surrounded by predators.
Having bought a toaster and electric kettle recently, I completely agree with your main point: buy the cheapest one you can bear to look at, because they're all the same in the essentials.
But this anecdote about your aside might be diverting. One of my earliest extended memories (in the 1960s) is watching my dad repair our toaster. winding new resistance wire around the mica central divider. (The toaster was a manual model with flip-open sides, toasting one side of the bread at a time.)
I don't think automatic toasters were all that cheap in the 1960s. Not everywhere, anyway, if repair of a manual toaster was worthwhile to do.
I'm not so sure about that. In my experience people tend to be less price sensitive with household appliances (big one time purchases that are supposed to last long) than they are with other more expensive items. Most people I know tend to be lifelong customers if they have good experiences with a specific brand and are very willing to share that brand as a recommendation.
The problem is, those good experiences don't seem to hold true anymore. Price hasn't been a good indicator for product quality and life expectancy for a while. I've seen this first hand with my family. My parents were very willing to spend significant amounts on stuff like dishwashers, fridges, or washing machines. Despite sticking to the brands they had good experiences with, the product lifetime decreased with every new product purchase. It has come to the point that they don't care for the brand they used to trust, they are just buying the stuff thats cheap and checks all the boxes.
These companies seem to have traded high customer loyalty (and possibly a very efficient organic marketing channel) for more frequent sales but higher price competition. I have no insights into those companies, but I'm not sure if that was an intelligent long term play.
Newer refridgerators with fancy water faucets and computers and locks have failed in the time I've had it.
Had a washer blow out on a computer control board; $750 for the board.
A similar washer blew out on the dial, $35 for the dial.
However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability only to be rejected by the US market and driven into the ground by General Motors. What is a quality manufacturer to do?
Similar story with old Honda’s. Simple cars that just worked with few problems, but they were simple cars with few electrical motors and digital features.
However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability
If you mean older Saabs, well the two stroke stuff has its own set of problems. They're neat cars but were just different enough to make it difficult to find a competent mechanic. Saab already had one foot in the grave by the time GM bought them.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Feds-investigate-Saab-90...
"Whirlpool brands include Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, Norge, Roper, and others. See all items in Dishwasher Dishrack. Whirlpool also makes various appliance models for Sears / Kenmore."
And once you start looking up part numbers you realize it goes even further.
E.g. the majority of consumer grade ice machines on Amazon (at least in the UK) uses a mechanism that is near identical. This extends to mostly copying a design flaw: Most of them a compartment used to immerse cooled metal rods in water, which then rotates out of the way to let the ice cubes fall into the ice compartment when done. Most of these are made out of plastic, with a motor rotating only one side. Problem is when it's stopped mechanically by simply hitting the end of the range of motion, which means the motor effectively ends up trying to twist the compartment. This works fine for casual use - the plastics holds for a while. But use it enough, and you get cracks developing. It's trivial to fix - some of the designs have an optical diode to stop rotation in one direction, but weirdly not in the other, and doing that in both directions would solve it
But I'm thinking that apart from not just coming up in testing (it takes a lot of cycles before it breaks), a lot of these problems spread because of cost cutting in the product development phase. It's a pretty obvious flaw if you observe the above mechanisms, and while you can cut a few cents of the bill of materials, without extensive testing you won't know for sure that it won't fail within the warranty window (they do if you use them as heavily as I use mine) and it doesn't take a very high failure rate to make an extra optical diode and wiring worth it. If people did product dev from scratch you'd expect at least some of them to decide it'd be worth it, but almost all of these are clearly just blindly copied designs (I'm sure multiple models must also be manufactured on spec by the same manufacturer).
As a result there's little real competition, and few customers will be aware there are better alternatives, especially because it takes quite a bit of wear and tear and so most people don't shop for these types of products often enough to realistically compare, and as you point out it's hard to prove (and takes a long time to develop a reputation).
Yeah you can, it's called warranty
1. We bought a Bosch hand blender (maxomixx) because it looked sturdy and was priced near the top at the mall -- thought that the brand and the price tag would guarantee that it would last. It broke after 8 months, turns out that the coupling between the mixer and the body is made of plastic that wore off. I called the Bosch service hotline, they told me that the whole body is one "part" that I can buy for ~80% of the original price.
2. Went back to the mall looking for one with metal coupling, turns out there is NONE. All of them are garbage with the same fault point. But luckily there is a wide selection of standing blenders, where some of them had much more massively looking, metal gears. Bought one from Electrolux. It broke after 3 months, this time the bearing on the bottom of the blender cup started leaking the grease into our food...
3. Gave up trying to get a blender from the mall, bought a Vitamix for 7x the price, which we're happy with for the last 3 years.
Yes, there is plenty of planned obsolence out there, and one of the greenest things you can do is buy premium stuff that will last you a lifetime (if you can afford it :/ )
I have an immersion blender that also has plastic gears, and even though the motor is sold as a single unit that is not an FRU, you can take it apart and service it with off-the-shelf gears you can source from eBay.
The two coffee grinders I have, high quality metal burrs, plastic gearing, for the same reason.
My higher quality power tools- track saw, drills, etc, all plastic gearing, metal everywhere else.
It just makes sense when it comes to repairs, though can be frustrating when they strip out.
That said, most consumer crap made today is complete shite.
Unfortunately, it's an open system, so the grease usually dries out after 5-10 years. Undo the 6 screws and put some marine grease on them every couple years everybody.
You can try to watch teardowns, like this DeWalt by Ave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHCS7JXfuv0
Gears at 16:40
Go watch some teardowns of cheap stuff vs expensive stuff and stop being a jerk.
I'm not your mom. I'm not gonna explain everything AND shop for you.
I preferred metal "shear pins" for this function ... much easier to find replacements for at the local hardware store.
It's a pretty elegant design. Unfortunately, a lot of people (including my wife, initially) would be prone to concluding that the whole unit was “worn out and needed replacing”.
3D printing could resolve some of that, but brands have been known to issue take downs or other legal threats over people sharing models so....
Sometimes they can be a right bastard to replace, but its still cheaper and much quicker than replacing a blown hydraulic pump and flushing the system to ensure no filings escaped the filters.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm
A deacon designed a horse cart where all the parts were designed to last a hundred years. Most cart had a weak spot which meant the cart wore out but never broke down. This thing was built with no weak spots.
So on the hundredth and one year to the day, all of a sudden everything failed at the same time and it collapsed into a cloud of dust.
FWIW you can buy used one for that price
1. They don't sell this coupler as a part. I could get one from abroad for like $7+postage and wait weeks for it.
2. This plastic crap is glued to the motor shaft. I might deform the shaft while trying to fix it.
The motor is in the base of course, driving a shaft that comes up through the center of the housing. So far, so good. The problem is that this beefy-looking motor is screwed onto three plastic pillars that are just part of the otherwise thin outer housing. Each pillar is essentially an "asterisk" cross-section, probably to minimize material, and it had just snapped off the outer shell. You can buy things like the blades or the plastic bowl, but not random parts from the inside (or, outside).
I managed to get it together with a screw through the housing and a large glob of epoxy putty, but the experience really emphasized that it was pretty much designed to fail.
However, I can never tell if this 5x premium actually gets me a better core product, or just gets me better branding, advertising, aesthetics, and/or superfluous features.
So I usually just buy the cheapest and hope for the best.
[−4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest – the article also has a few pointers to international, similar organisations near the bottom.
I think that's largely due to car enthusiasts having insufficient self-awareness about the degree to which their priorities differ from those of mainstream consumers. PC gamers and PC building enthusiasts are also frustratingly prone to this kind of thing. (I spent several years reviewing PC hardware for a living, which included constantly fielding comments from readers who seemed to be genuinely unable to understand how their could be a market for low-end components.)
I assume that other articles have similar issues, and that I'm just unaware because they're not within my area of expertise.
If they give your product good marks, you are not allowed to mention it in your marketing (Not sure how they enforce it; maybe they stop reviewing your stuff).
I worked at a company that regularly got top marks from them, and our Marketing folks would have fits, because they couldn't mention it.
https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-a-black-eye-for-co...
Tell me again how it was some cover up. They literally published your argument along with the review.
The ruling on an appeal makes the argument better than i could.
> [The] først theory is that CU know it was probably lying because its employees tries to make the samurai flip and we're happy when they suceeded. The second is that CU purposely avoided the truth by failing to address a potential source of experimental error. Neither of these theories withstands serious scrutiny
The opinion end up concluding that the entire reason for changing the test setup, along with a description of the changes, was present in the article.
What a non-story.
'The media lied to you about COVID-19 – TAKE ACTION NOW'
'Critical Race Theory in schools, take action now!'
'Gender activists are politicizing the dictionary: TAKE ACTION NOW'
'Stand up for Rush – TAKE ACTION NOW'
'VOX buries the truth'
'CNN admits Hunter Biden ‘a real problem’ for Joe Biden, not ‘a right-wing media story’'
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Accuracy_in_Media
I am less confident about either your contention or about the position you are attacking than about the idea that this particular website is going to lie to me about it.
Kirk: Send some red shirts.
Spock: They're all in Agile training today.
Kirk: Do we have any rock drummers?
RIP Neil Peart
That's kind of how it worked when Zep was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors a few years back, with Ann and Nancy Wilson + Jason Bonham, son of John, + others doing Stairway to Heaven.
This is basic critical thinking, you don't have to be as shallow as many readers of that website probably are, you're just choosing to be.
Please list one of those that are false, so you can be educated.
It did not get little media attention. Indeed, the lawsuit got rather a lot.
> AIM has submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that Suzuki should be allowed to present its evidence to a jury. It is hard to understand how any judge could honestly rule that the evidence in this case does not prove that the defendant knew that its claim that the Samurai “rolled over easily” was false.
The source definitely has a dog in this hunt.
Who are we to believe, a partisan in the lawsuit, or the trial judge? And why?
It's very likely that AIM's goal is to present the best facts in their argument, and ignore or minimize other factors. Or as CU put it (quoting https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... ): "First it was the cigarette makers, now it's an automobile manufacturer. Different industries, same desperate tactics. Throw up a smoke screen, hurl ludicrous charges, and falsely claim (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that their product is safe -- all to avoid liability for defective and dangerous products." ...
> "We welcome and invite NHTSA to evaluate our honesty and integrity. Courts have done so and found unanimously that our methodology was beyond reproach. For example, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York -- one of the nation's most highly respected courts -- has said that our work 'exemplifies the very highest order of responsible journalism.'"" ...
> "On the other hand, Dr. Pittle said, in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review, a Federal Court of Appeals stated that Suzuki and its attorneys "engaged in an unrelenting campaign to obfuscate the truth."
> "The truth that was revealed despite Suzuki's cover-up is that Suzuki knew -- prior to first selling the car in the U.S. -- that the vehicle had a 'rollover problem' and that General Motors refused to sell the car because its evaluation demonstrated the danger of rollover," Dr. Pittle said.
Do you really expect HN readers to act like trial court judges and decide which of these two partisans are correct, and dig through decades old material to offer a point-by-point rebuttal?
If the evidence is so clear-cut, why did Suzuki and CU end up with a rather mundane settlement?
The opportunity they have to lie to somebody who is unfamiliar with the subject is immense. Falsehood could be hiding in any of a thousand places, and it could easily require you to hire a team of experts for weeks to find it and conclusively debunk it, line by line. It may well require decompiling what is functionally or literally the source code behind the piece to dismiss one's suspicions. "Basic critical thinking" is not trivial against a determined adversary.
Whether to take the claims within on face value depends on your purpose and on what you know of the writer. In this case, it is very easy to become quite familiar with this motivation and ethics of the writer in under a minute by clicking around the website, and come to the reasonable conclusion that this is a place that generally attempts to deceive their reader to secure material gain for their patrons & movement, and there are likely deliberate lies somewhere in the body of the piece. You don't even need to read the body.
Indeed, the real story would appear to be rather more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....
Critical thinking does not require you to carefully parse every bit of garbage on the planet.
SUVs evolved to address the risks pointed out by CR and other entities. They mostly have wider wheelbases and lower centers of gravity.
Emails, social media posts, website landing pages, collateral in-store/retail is all fully acceptable. You can also pay additional fees to them for additional materials to use in communications.
Sometimes they start with a premise they want to prove instead of just providing a straight review of the products. They may do this by selecting the criteria (key performance metrics), for example.
Sometimes, they just don't competently evaluate the products because they fail to take into account real world consumer needs.
The quality of reviews in CR these days doesn't hold a candle to what CR used to provide, but I remain a member because even a weak signal is better than the other random stuff out there like Amazon reviews.
FWIW, I do love my Ford Edge and it is still the daily driver for our household
Within 2 years, every single one had failures. For instance, the oven's convection fan failed in a month. The washer AND dryer completely failed within 3 years. I bought refurbished units from a local guy, and when I told him what I had, he didn't even want them to flip again.
I, too, resigned myself to the fact that, unless you pay for commercial-grade appliances, it's all crap, and you may as well just buy the cheapest thing at Lowe's, and replace it when it fails. The industry deserves all the loss of trust they have earned.
rtings does good work, I'd pay a flat fee for it. But a subscription for a website I check every 2-3 years when I'm upgrading some tech? I'll just clear my cookies.
If you're specifically looking at mice, you might want to check out RocketJumpNinja. The reviews are pretty biased towards suitability for FPS, but they are quite in depth, and the reviewer is pretty knowledgeable.
Yeah, exactly. I really love the idea, but not the results.
Here for France: https://www.60millions-mag.com/tests-comparatifs
(I just laughed as I see they even review fries brands, and sex toys...)
ETM [0] is subscription funded and their tests are far more detailed, and they even show the data (e. g. power usage curves for a toaster, measured air replacement curves for a fan, etc.).
Anyway, in this case, they simply have not tested any dehumidifiers.
They also provide help to launch class action. ( that exists differently than a US class action )
Yeah same, those reviews are either bought, or made on a whim by people who aren't critical of what they buy - especially if the company or seller goad them into reviewing with giveaways or whatever. There will be good reviews, but they will be buried in the thousand+ mediocre ones.
They often are somewhat marginal at the edges - e.g., for computers. But otherwise they are useful for consumer products.
We’ve had ours for 8 years and it works like new and doesn’t smell like the motor is burning out like so many cheap blenders do.
Your statement would be correct for the majority of companies however, but Vitamix is actually distinct in that regard (currently)
Newer models are typically much lighter. This means they now have far less internal material to reduce noise. I can't use mine without ear protection since it's about chainsaw level of noise. The reduced weight means I also need to hold onto it during use otherwise it will vibrate itself off the counter.
The company seems to be most interested in selling smoothie recipe subscriptions for their blender companion phone app. Aside from subscription selling the app is pretty much useless -- who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?
Here's an idea: if you find the blender to be too loud, go into a different room, close the door, and remotely trigger the blender with your smartphone app.
We put our blender in our pantry because we can close the door and blend without waking up the baby. Otherwise it (Blendtec) is too loud!
EDIT: to the downvoters, this was tongue in cheek. It would obviously be better for them to spend more money on soundproofing and less on a useless app!
Having my smoker self-manage its temperature and graph the amount of heat it's dumped in is nice. Checking on the temperature ramp of the sous vide is nice, too.
I am sure some next generation developers are already demanding to install VSCode on fridges so one can code on Samsung Smart refrigerators screens.
Wouldn't it be great that while fridge telling about running short on Kale green also download a gigabyte of NPM garbage to display image of Kale green in a bag?
Do better.
Manufacturers can't justify producing a more reliable product at a higher price point, because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price.
Of course, many execs look at brand value as something to be harvested for short term gains to the value of their options, but that’s a different problem.
Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names
From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight.
I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.
See this Drill is DW345, we sell DW350, it is 5 better
If I was choosing between brand A and twice as expensive brand B, and brand B said "we trust that our stuff will last so we offer a 10-year, no questions asked warranty", I would go for B in a heartbeat. (As long as it was a brand with some history so I can trust they don't just go out of business.)
like help lines which charge 80 cents/minute to not help you?
* insert terms so onerous you’re very unlikely to claim, you have to ship the item on your own dime halfway across the world, if defect is deemed not covered (and you bet it won’t be) disposal at your expense or return as is at your expense, extended warranty void if you didn’t do $frivolousThing at time of purchase and not a day later, extended warranty doesn’t transfer to new owner, etc.
We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave...
We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi.
But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing.
We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative.
It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.
Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here).
There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame.
If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.
Very sturdy, easy to use, easy to clean, and surprisingly quiet.
Random review: https://www.home-barista.com/blog/bplus-apollo-hand-grinder-...
Went with the BPlus Apollo. See my response below to yaldiz.
The one weakness it has is the plastic ring that holds the upper burr set. This appears to be intentionally designed to break as a sacrificial part if anything jams. Replacements are a few bucks.
In power tools for instance, there's a number of YouTube channels that do high quality testing. In some cases some identified faults appear to have caught the eye of the manufacturer. Hopefully over time this feedback loop will result in higher quality products that still hit their price target.
That is what warranties are for. You say it is reliable? Put it in writing how long you think it will keep working and what will you owe the customer if it ain’t so.
MTBF is exec poison. Too high, and the customer doesn't come back, you see, or worse, it's too expensive to build! (According to finance).
The motor doesn't sound as good these days, so I considered replacing the whole thing. Fortunately after I wiggled the gasket it seemed to stop leaking!
For a wide range of consumables and gear that hackers of the physical world would probably like, check out Project Farm, protoolreviews, ToolGuyd, and of course AvE on YouTube.
For kitchen gear, check out America's Test Kitchen.
I hang out in r/bifl but it isn't as good as it used to be for my personal tastes, as there isn't as much of an emphasis on repairability as I'd prefer.
I wish there was a trend of someone like AvE doing a teardown of junk-quality consumer gear, then by replacing certain parts like bad capacitors, plastic gears, etc., turning it into much higher-quality equipment, and open-sourcing those small parts' design and manufacturing specs.
One hack I employ is I go straight to the servicing departments and find the service technicians, and lately I only go to commercial B2B offerings. They are usually more than happy to tell you which manufacturers and product lines are easiest to diagnose and service (and whether that conjunction of characteristics leads to reliability), have a reliable supply of parts, maintain that parts supply the longest, and have retained all those characteristics the most years. It is no more than a 10-15 minute conversation most service technicians are happy to have.
They will be especially happy to talk with you if you ask them how you can plan to accommodate their service visits more pleasant and efficient to work in. HVAC techs in particular will trade around site porn of customers who planned ahead, put in a proper-sized and sited pad easy to roll up to with all their equipment in their work van, with provisions for ample shade that doesn't obstruct the equipment airflow. They will <squee> over that more than tween girls over the heartthrob du jour.
Then I talk up staff at businesses who have to use the equipment every day to find out the most annoying aspects of using that equipment to determine whether I can put up with those idiosyncracies myself.
There are some manufacturers I will absolutely not even consider in the US for some equipment, for example. Samsung refrigerators; they are not designed to last past the warranty, not designed to be easily diagnosed and serviced, and their parts supply network reflects that. There are some categories of equipment I have absolute requirements no matter where I am in the world. Rigging gear where a failure puts life and safety at risk I will outright refuse to purchase and use from anywhere but Japan, Germany, and the US from long-standing manufacturers making it in those nations. I will pay the price to import it to where I am and wait for as long as it takes to get through customs. I'm beginning to stop using Amazon and switching to direct from manufacturer, distributors, or retailers listed on the manufacturer's web site; the SKU commingling issue has gotten out of hand, and Amazon's poor inventory control has robbed whatever unique value proposition their logistics arm painstakingly built up.
A commercial one is a problem at home unless you make 20 coffees a day because it is going to retain a lot of grinds (not a problem if you have a lot of throughput, it won't go stale). It will also be noisy and big.
A prosumer one should be quite and good for not retaining grinds, but would be bad for commercial as it wont be fast enough (ten times slower), and you you don't want to wait grind for every shot. Also a prosumer one would look nicer probably.
Plus the company introduces a wait. No blame on hot wheels, they (I think, not sure but want to believe) try to live up to being a cool toy. Good gift. They want to be a good gift, like get a kid saying "Ohhhhh, damnit I mean gosh-darn-it, sorry, hot wheels cars, real cars, wow oh wow oh wow oh wow!" Jumping up and down. But it's still a wait. So the problem is, reminiscing upon childhood, children make promises to themselves about holding out until birthdays and Christmas. So if they break that promise with themselves because a "company" (what's that?) "makes an error" (like on a test?) then it's like...nah, "I'm not a happy kid."
I don't think it is planned obsolescence, it is just a race to the bottom on price. At $30, an immersion blender can't have metal gears. Most people value cheapness more than quality, so we get cheap junky products. Nylon gears are a travesty, but most people prefer replacing crap to paying 7x for the Vitamix.
I value quality and price. Unfortunately, while price is clearly stated, poor quality is often hidden.
Well, it would help tremendously if costs per month/year/lifetime were more obvious. A lot of people just don't know how long certain appliances are supposed to last at what price points comparatively. 7x is only a hefty price tag upfront when you know it will pay for itself over time, but even that is no longer certain.
The high-end blender lines of both brands are made domestically, and rate at the top in Consumer Reports. I can vouch that both are pretty quiet in operation, for what are essentially food-violence machines.
Just because it's a German brand like Bosch doesn't mean it's made in Germany, from quality parts, so, buyer beware.
Often the components he designs cost more to manufacture that components that would last much, much longer. . To build a pump that will 99 percent make it to 3000 hours, that means half will make it to 9000 hours or more. Unless you really, really make sure that 90 percent will also fail by 4000 hours. It’s not easy to do.
Some products actually incorporate extra parts such as batteries that serve no other purpose than to cause the unit to degrade after a certain time (honeywell thermostats I’m looking at you … their round thermostat includes a lithium cell. When the lithium cell degrades, the at328p processor switches to a limping mode that regulates +/- 10 degrees, but never less than a little over freezing. The (soldered) battery just goes through a resistor to a GPIO pin. It’s just a chemical timer. It serves no other purpose than to make the unit need to be replaced.)
I could go on and on and on, but stuff is definitely designed to fail in predictable ways in a predermined timeframe. Considerable expense is invested in this behavior.
If the latter, how does it help Honeywell that you have to replace it?
You can't pick up a standard 18650 battery at Walmart either, but that doesn't make it some kind of special battery. It's bog-standard. Availability at Walmart has nothing to do with something is standard or even common. Brake pads for some random mass-market 2015 model year car (GM, Toyota, etc.) are nothing special or difficult to find either, but you're not going to find them at Walmart.
This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find. I can either get the 2 cells needed from the manufacturer at about 70% the cost of a new light, or get a new light. It’s technically repairable/user serviceable, it’s just not practical to do. Apple is playing a similar trick with their 80lbs iPhone repair kit to change the battery yourself: technically user repairable, practically not.
Huh? You seem to be contradicting yourself: you say it's a standard 18650 cell. That's not something custom, that's something you can buy from an electronics supplier quite easily. And no, having both poles on the same end isn't something custom either, that's just a variant you can buy. You should be able to find this exact part on digikey.com.
>This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find.
If you can buy something on digikey.com, it's not "exotic". They even ship small orders by USPS for cheap. It might be "exotic" to a typical consumer, but those people don't know how to use a soldering iron.
We all know the typical HN reader thinks a fun weekend would be spending 6 hours researching part numbers and getting out the soldering iron, but we are atypical. Most people will assume their product is at the end of its life because the warranty has lapsed and it doesn't work anymore. Companies are apparently betting on that and it's an environmental travesty.
Yes, I know. I said this exact thing above.
The parent said these devices used "custom batteries", implying that Honeywell et al were custom-designing and manufacturing their own special nonstandard batteries just for these applications. This is incorrect, and needed to be corrected.
But it’s rare enough that it’s hard to find. So much so that it actually doesn’t make economical sense to find this (rare, at a premium) variant because it would cost about as much or more than a new light (which includes new batteries, ironically)
Since we had over a hundred of these deployed in an apartment complex, when they started failing I carefully characterized their behavior. It just makes them go wonky when it is removed or dies. The at328p functions fine without it, there is no RTC or anything that needs a battery., and the chip is not powered by the battery when power is removed. In fact, there is no discharge from the battery when power is off. The at328p has nonvolatile eeprom and flash storage.
Interestingly, the wonky behavior it exhibits is the same (but doesn’t go below 40 degrees (f) ) as an old electromechanical one failing lol.
...so the company making parts with them can then extoll the virtues of "biodegradable" in their marketing...?
Also, for those who doubt the claim about the Honeywell thermostat having a battery, I did some further research, and it does appear to be true:
https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/128526/honeywell-th...
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3V5R0MJGEFNXH
But then this video shows that it is relatively easy to replace, it's not soldered in place, although the comments there do mention that the presence of the battery isn't documented anywhere in the original instructions:
Many people add ficituous evidence of their views because they are so sure they are right.
Also, the gears inside of refrigerator defrost timers in the 160 refrigerators we bought for an apartment complex. Shockingly, still mechanical. And one of the gears is date coded and has teeth made of a rubbery, disintegrating plastic around a regular nylon wheel. The vast majority of the timers failed in a two years window. At 7-8 years. The cheap replacement timers have no such nonsense and I’ve never seen one fail. Most people just would have replaced the cheap apartment fridge.
This is just some of what I’ve personally seen.
But you are right, I’m just some guy on the internet, I could be just making this up.
And corporations would never make things with life limitations to make more money. Surely. I mean, that would be like a subscription model! Ridiculous!
Engineering is both easy and incredibly difficult. It is relatively easy to design something that does a particular task (at least for many of the applications being discussed here). It is incredibly difficult to design something that does its job well or last for a long time.
No, that's relatively easy as well. What's incredibly difficult is doing so while keeping the BOM cost under control in a competitive market.
Recall the classic saying, "Any idiot can design a bridge that will stand up. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up."
I have never seen any example of 'planned obsolescence' which was anything more than giving the consumer what the consumer wants. Modern economy is essentially the peak optimization of cost vs utility, i.e. value maximization.
So, yeah, I'd like to see a model number as well.
The plastic tub that contained the rotating drum was hung up on springs just like in any other washing machine.
The holes in the tub where the ends of the springs went through were just that, holes without any reinforcements.
The inevitable happened (because the strain in the plastic where it met the unforgiving steel of the springs was too much) and over the years, the holes wore through the plastic, resembling an oblong shape more and more.
I simply pressed a metal bushing into the enlarged hole on one side and on the other, I used two small strips of steel (with holes in it for the spring) clamped to the tub with bolt and nut.
And voilà the machine easily did another two years (electronics now messed up).
This case is either a pitiable engineering failure or 100 % planned obsolescence.
Merely equipping the holes in the plastic tub with metal bushings would have easily made this part outlive every other failure.
Cheaper things aren't necessarily bad either. You don't want things like fridges and blenders to be items only the rich can afford and less robust things are probably fine if it was clear under what conditions you can use the item to make it last and if the item was easily repairable.
Lastly, I don't think you can blame the manufacturers alone either. I know people who don't like used things even if they are still good and will always buy new.
This is for example why flying commercial is such a miserable experience: people will look for the cheapest ticket that gets them to their destination because the whole thing is like being treated like cattle. Why then should you pay a single cent more for the same shitty experience? Airlines that used to offer a slightly better experience have figured this out and also treat you like cattle now so they can also offer the route for a low or lower price.
This is not unique to airlines, and this is my default mode of purchasing things because I’ve been burnt too many times. Unless I know for sure that X brand is much more durable and repairable than another, I’ll always go for the cheapest I can find that meets my needs.
It's eight months old. They *have* to replace it under warranty.
The store ships it back to the manufacturer, and if they are smart they tear it down and improve whatever caused it to break.
If enough people did this quality would improve.
Of course you might end up wishing for crappy plastic gears over something with enough torque to shear a finger off...
As an aside, AIUI there are two Boschs, and 'consumer Bosch' is merely a marketing/branding department.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4415363
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3969534
https://www.printables.com/model/172705-bosch-blender-coupli...
You could try printing it yourself, or using a 3D printing service to get a replacement. It would be interesting to see how different material options hold up.
FDM printed parts are inherently much weaker than injection molded ones, simply it breaks very easily between the layers. Even if you print it in the right direction it will be much weaker. Maybe parts printed with continuous glass fibers could hold up with the original part, which was crap in itself.
Until there are affordable printers that can print metal this will be crap by design. Or I could buy a CNC that can work with steel :)
In total I'm in for about $450 and have a powerful blender that should last for at least the next decade.
Why are you being asked to pay for a replacement? Isn’t this covered under warranty?
Also a 90 day warranty is not uncommon
In Australia a 12 month warranty is required. And for “expensive goods” it’s 24 months.
I’m not sure where the line is, but an iPhone certainly falls into the expensive category.
When those battery woes occurred, Apple was required to replace batteries, and they did.
[edit]
It's not quite "Caveat Emptor" but rather "perfect-tender" which still requires the buyer to inspect the items with "reasonable promptness"
If it's your hobby to cook more elaborately, of course, you still end up in the position of having no quality options. But if you're dealing with something sufficiently disposable, maybe it makes sense to lean into it. Everyone who writes or draws regularly has extra stationary supplies, for example - but not everyone goes down the route of getting a converter fountain pen and filling it with bottled ink. The extra packaging of a disposable pen body is waste, but the all-in-one nature of it makes it portable, fungible.
I actually made an attempt to calculate what it would take to replace everything I seriously use in my home recently - all the cookware, electronics, toiletries, furniture, office supplies, clothes, cleaning tools. I estimate that it would be under $15k. Whatever I have on top of that is essentially just purchases that turned into waste - extra clothes, extra furniture, etc.
So most of my outgoing costs are strictly recurring service charges: rent, energy, food, transport, insurance, etc. We often get appliances in hopes of beating those service charges, but then it turns into junk.
On balance, most things can be done more easily than they used to be with an appropriate mix of product and service. But we also all got on the hedonic treadmill and the promise of living better by buying better. Maybe that's not how to live better.
Or my new hated phrase "ready to ship" on store websites, in other words they don't have it. Why would I get it shipped to them and then have to call when I can just order it direct.
Between crap quality, apathetic store staff, and no inventory it's become a pain to buy anything locally or online even just a regular toaster.
The annoying part is that you can end up missing on new features.
I look at the Zojirushi rice cooker that I bought in college - a hefty purchase at the time - the Jaguar of rice cookers at a time when I should have been buying the $10 Black and Decker rice cooker. It's still with me, over a decade later, through countless moves, a handful of girlfriend (who all had opinions on it, interestingly), and at least 1,000 bowls of rice cooked.
The battery that keeps the time died (I could replace it, but I'd have to take it apart and it's technically non-replaceable), but other than that it's working perfectly. The rice is as good as it ever has been.
My oh most first world of problems? A while ago Zojirushi released rice cookers also function as pressure cookers in the same device. I'd love to upgrade so I can quickly make stews in it, but I cannot possibly retire my old one just because it's old.
Most likely I'm going to end up having two Zojirushis because well, rice goes pretty well with stew and you can't exactly make both simultaneously. And then in 10 years when they make one that's both a rice cooker, a pressure cooker, and an air fryer; I'll be having this monologue again.
I can also relate to your envy of the new models we don’t need.
Why not sell it second hand? Someone (even a student like you once were?) will happily extract a decade or more of value from it and you’ll get some of your money back towards the upgrade.
I've had exactly the same problem with blenders, several times, where for example a small plastic tab that secures the blender bowl to the motor base snaps off, making the whole thing useless.
It would not be such an issue if these couplings were standardized in some way, so that you could buy a replacement, other than the manufacturer's hugely price inflated spare part.
Contrast the situation with when your PC graphics card or memory stick fails, you can just buy a commodity replacement, rather than junking the whole PC, screen, keyboard.
The more philosophical problem of course is that market capitalism's one incentive is to make profit. Making good products is only incidental to that imperative, and clearly not always a requirement.
I would have tried these first:
Light duty:
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb33x-quik-stik-7-i...
Turn it up:
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb40-quik-stik-plus...
Bring the noise!...
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/robot-coupe-mp600-turbo-23-...
You probably don't want a commercial-kitchen dishwasher; IIRC you're expected to have someone in to replace the hoses in them every year or two, because they make those hoses out of plastics that are tolerant to higher temperatures, but at the expense of plasticizer degradation (becoming stiff + brittle) after just sitting around at ambient temperature-and-pressure for a few years. A residential dishwasher, while not able to clean as well, will be able to start up just fine after years of disuse; which is more what you want in a house or apartment that might go years sitting empty.
I really would like one of the bar water jets they use for cleaning the mixers/shakers, tho!
Best move ever! Our Kitchen Aid mixer, for example, is metal construction, has servicable motor parts, and just works. Well, it did get glitchy a month or two back. I took it apart, saw flour everywhere. Hit it with compressed air, greased up some things, cleaned the motor brushes and mating parts, put it back together and it's like new!
Toaster, blender, can opener, all the same deal. When I get them, I do a quick test and refurb on them. Doesn't take long, and often I can get parts, depending on what it is. Once I know the device, I feel like I can depend on it. And going used = ultra cheap. It's kind of crazy how cheap.
And these things are simple. They have the features they need to and that's kind of it. Attachments are not hard to find either.
Worst case it's a bad call. Oh well, try again.
I am so tired of "cheap" stuff breaking.
I'm not saying this to dunk on Americans. I'm just saying this is a problem that can be addressed with proper consumer protection regulations. Mind you, products will still fail and need to be replaced but this incentivizes manufacturers to aim for 2 years of use rather than 2 months.
Of course the real problem is that the broken device becomes your problem once the legal guarantee runs out and electronics waste is just handled in bulk, disregarding the environmental impact and resource waste. All the long-term damage becomes an externality so companies will optimize for limiting the lifetime of components to the least they can get away with because longer lasting products mean fewer sales.
As I said somewhere else, first buy cheap, if it fails you know better what you really need and can buy the right expensive stuff. If it does not fail, enjoy your luck.
Same goes for whiteware that's expected to last more than 5 generally.
Shops still somehow sell extended warranties though. Crooks.
But you're absolutely right. Buying cheap stuff is bad in so many ways. Since they wear out faster, you end up replacing them much more often, which is environmentally bad, and in the long run, costs more. The problem is that being expensive does not necessarily correlate with lasting long.
When our TV died a few years ago, my kids pooled together and bought me a 50" Samsung 4k TV. It's a great device in so many ways, but after 3 years, the backlights started failing. Right now half the screen is dark, and it would cost almost as much as a new TV to get them replaced, with a part that probably costs all of $5 to manufacture. So it's been hanging on the wall for the last year, because I've been too cheap to replace the whole TV, and too scared too attempt the repair on my own, since it involves stripping the thing down to the frame (and removing that enormous panel). I still might try some day. It's worth a $50 gamble to get the TV back. Either that or I'll just replace the darn thing. This TV (like all modern TVs) is a miracle of engineering, and the thing that stopped it from being usable is probably the simplest and one of the cheapest components.
My first TV was a hand-me-down from my parents that eventually died in late '88 or '89. It was an RCA from 1968. Then I bought a 26" RCA TV in 1989 and used it until we replaced it with an HD TV in 2012. It still worked fine when we got rid of it, and I was sad to see it go, even though we had no use for it.
How about replacing appliances with new ones? Washers can now do both - wash and dry AND it has heat pump. Induction cooktop are way more efficient. Instant hot water taps translates to smaller hot water cylinders. Japanese style fridges spoil less food.
But one-year warranties have been a thing everywhere for a long time I believe, so I hope you got your money back for both devices.
A good channel on youtube for these kinds of things is AvE, especially his older videos are good breakdowns and explanations of mostly electric tools where the creator points out things like molding, plastics, but also gears and probable failure modes - often a switch or as you mentioned, plastic gears or bad / missing bearings. The best device he had a teardown of was actually the Juicero, a massively over-engineered piece of hardware that was basically an inefficient press - as in, you get more juice just by hand-squeezing/rolling the overpriced Juicero bags.
Is that company still in business? If it does I'm sure some SF companies with too much money on their hands are still paying their subscriptions / deliveries.
Edit: it is not, they went out of business in 2017.
Economically this is almost always the case.
Before manufacturing tolerances were as tight, they'd error on the side of caution and overbuild, resulting in a wider MTBF curve. There were both many early failures as well as ones which far exceeded their expected life. Now, the standard deviation is much smaller so the end-of-life has become more well-defined both at the cost of nothing much lasting longer nor shorter than expected.
He drove in such a way as to make sure it didn't work before the warranty was up, and then they fixed it.
Or more likely, they set the warranty period to be just below the MTBF
This I assume is also why amazon.de won't let you access invoices a while after purchase without talking to a CSR.
The EU directive on this says that all products sold here should be free of manufacturing defects within the first 24 months(it's 6 years for most products actually). But the key word here is manufacturing defect. Furthermore, the law clearly states that any fault found within the first 6 months is presumed to have been a manufacturing defect, anything found afterwards it's up to the consumer to prove that it was a manufacturing defect and not a fault that developed later.
As you can see, that's not the same as unconditional 24-month warranty - if your laptop dies 23 months in, good luck proving that it died because of a manufacting defect without hiring an expert to do so. Yes some places will repair it anyway to avoid the hassle, but it's not codified in the law.
On the bright side, EU(and UK) make the seller responsible for the products sold, so if your item breaks and the seller goes "oh well you need to go to the manufacturer to get it fixed" you can politely decline and demand that they repair/replace/refund it for you - that's the law.
Not quite. They're designed to last at least as long as the warranty so that they don't lose money on returns. At least based on my experience in Dyson.
They don't deliberate sabotage anything like some people seem to think. Like there's no 5 year clock that is programmed to break so you have to buy another. If some part is cheap and lasts 20 years they aren't going to deliberately weaken it just so it breaks after 5 years.
What actually happens is they reduce the cost of expensive parts as much as possible (to save money) subject to the constraint that it can't fail within the warranty.
Part of the reason why early versions of products are often more reliable than later ones - they haven't sold very many so there's no financial incentive yet to do extensive cost-down optimisation (and they haven't had time).
It's still not great IMO but it's not outright evil. Your average Redditor thinks there are lightbulb conspiracies around every corner and that's just untrue.
Sounds a lot like printers and their ink cartridges.
also it sucks well which does help
apple watch is of similar trajectory kudos to these two products
One way to gauge it is see how available repair parts are (all systems eventually wear out) and what the costs look like.
So I just buy appliances from Costco and assume I will have to replace sometime after 4 years.
As one data point, all of my LG Costco appliances from almost 4 years ago are still working fine, through very heavy use. We probably use washers/dryers 10+ cycles per week due to babies/toddlers. The LG inverter linear compressor fridge is still as silent as the day we got it.
If Speed Queen’s data showed them their machines lasted 40 years, then they would advertise them with a 40 year warranty to maximize sales.
Since they do not, it is safe to say that Speed Queen does not want to bet their machines will last 40 years. So why should I bet they will last longer than their stated warranty period?
It is possible that Speed Queens are worth more because they are more repairable, but I have no interest in spending my time repairing my washer/dryer. And calling a technician would be $100/hour plus parts, at which point I might as well buy a new machine.
in other words, if BrandX had products they believed would last 40 years, they would have a warranty that says so, and it would not decrease the reliability 1 iota
Also, longer warranties can be a selling point (speed queen does this with the same exact internals being sold with a higher warranty on the 'fancier' ones which just add some more features to the board).
And, a company has to hold monies on the books for warranty service, so a defined warranty period that is not unreasonable can help with that.
But the "best" company in a given market only needs to warranty beyond the nearest competitor.
Speed Queen also is implicitly dealing with people who would buy the "lifetime" warranty residential unit and run it in a commercial setting, where the wear parts would wear out.
If the Speed Queen cost 50% more, I would be inclined to buy it. But at 3x the price, I feel like it’s just easier for me to replace, and since it is Costco, I trust that the process will be easy.
Wouldn't that mean they should have longer stated warranty than estimated lifetime?
There is little enforcement of warranties from the FTC. They cannot afford to do investigations, because they are civil litigation.
If the manufacturer doesn't like it, they get dropped by Costco like a hot potato.
For what it's worth, the Speed Queen washer/dryers people seem to like, appear to also share parts with Maytag [1], which means Whirlpool made, or uses, or shares at least designs for parts, even though Speed Queen is owned by Alliance Laundry Systems, who also make the Huebsch machines in apartments, which, are commercial grade, but still not free of problems (i.e., >half of front loading machines in one place I've been in have the marbles-in-bearings sound when spinning, which a newly replaced machine didn't)
Some models of Speed Queen washers I've seen people open on YouTube look suspiciously like a Whirlpool "direct drive" 90s washer.
[1] https://ibb.co/PzQxxP6 - I searched for "speed queen transmission" on DuckDuckGo Images and found this listing that mentions compatibility between that and Maytag. I also recognize that transmission as a Whirlpoolish thing.
Given that most appliances around me are made by Whirlpool, I don't personally have anything to compare them to. I haven't personally seen many extreme design flaws, but the parts are built down to a cost. For example, all of their dryer motors are epoxied together instead of bolted, like every other motor, probably to save cost at assembly, and conveniently prevents oiling and servicing of the bushing/bearing. The washer pumps for the aforementioned "direct drive" washers are sealed, and if something gets jammed, you can't take them apart to unjam them (though I've unjammed one before, and they don't cost much, and there is a ~good reason to seal it shut).
However, whatever evils, if any, Whirlpool puts into their machines, at least you can get the parts, and compatibles exist, and junkyards are probably full of compatible parts, simply because the parts are all shared between most Whirlpool appliances in existence.
I've had one example of a bad experience with the electronic controls on a Maytag front load washing machine. I don't consider a single sample to be representative, but the software on the control was poor and refused to spin-dry a blanket after washing it. It wasn't because the machine was unbalanced. It would rotate the blanket very slowly (zero shaking), and just decide not to do anything else. It eventually did it after a bout of unplugging, pushing buttons, and cursing.
Two words: planned obsolescence.
However, sometimes you get lucky buying cheap stuff that lasts and that is the experience we like to remember and try to repeat.
Paying more indeed isn't a reliable signal because even if a brand truly has a reputation for reliable stuff there is no guarantee someone isn't pulling the aforementioned strategy in the background.
All the companies that made things that last forever went out of business.
Parts provide a regular revenue stream, consumers don’t have to buy a new appliance every three years, and swapping a gear doesn’t cost 75% of a new appliance.
This pathological capitalism has to go away forever. It's bad for consumers and bad for the environment. Companies exist because society allows them to exist, and they're allowed to exist because people believe they will fulfill their wants and needs. If they keep failing us in such spectacular ways, there's no reason for them to keep existing.
Not saying this is great and I try to buy higher-quality goods if possible, but the reality is that needs and wants of high-income persons might be different to those of the poor.
The cheap ones by lasting very little. The reliable ones by being very expensive.
People have no way to know longevity of the product they are buying
Pretty much anything within about an order of magnitude in price will be value engineered like everything else.
Go to a specialty store with 10x the budget and they’ll hook you up with something where price was not a primary engineering factor.
For example, the $1200 chair I'm sitting on is unquestionably better quality than the $120 chair it replaced. The $120 chair had no warranty, only the retailer's return policy. The manufacturer of the $1200 chair will gladly send someone to my house for free to replace a squeaky wheel more than a decade from now.
So, as usual, it's an information problem. We don't pay for quality, because it's almost impossible to know that we actually get what we pay for. So it's more rational to buy some cheap stuff and hope for the best instead of paying 5 times as much and be disappointed again when the stuff breaks.
This is so annoying. There are pointless model churn for everything. You can't keep up and get a understanding of what is quality or not becouse when a device has been on the market for a while and you can know if it last it is out of production.
(I'm not saying it sacrificially; I think both sides have a point.)
Consumer grade stuff has been a race to the bottom on price and quality for years with glitzy bullshit features like WiFi support making up in marketing.
But Amazon, Walmart, Whirlpool, GE, etc, have no useful indications for longevity.
There’s no way to know how long your fridge will last before you buy it. So why spend more when you literally have no idea if it’s actually better quality?
I've had the same experience. E.g. I bought a kettle 2 years ago and it lasted for 6 months. Previous kettles have lasted many years (as they should).
First, TIL: Since in the US the mains voltage is 120V, kettle there have less power (or would trip the circuit protection/burn out old sockets) than our 240V kettles (Amazon offers plenty 2200W units, might be a legal limit). It's obvious, but I totally forgot to consider this.
Anyway, the main failures to expect from a kettle is a failing heating element or leaky sealing. Both can be avoided by using induction. But with induction stoves becoming the norm for new kitchens (at least around here), all you need is a suitable, passive kettle instead of the kettle+base. Plus a 3.7kW induction field will be faster to boil water than something that plugs into a 240V/16A socket.
Only reason to go with a standalone kettle appliance are "smart" kettles with more precise temperature control (some teas should be prepared at specific temperatures).
TL;Dr: Upgrade to an inductive stove, get a passive kettle for it, be happy :)
Personally, when buying new pots and pans in the last decade, I picked only those that work with induction (payed something like 20 Euro extra, in total); so when we finally swap the stove, we only have to replace one pan. Several friends make the same complaint, and I never understood why they didn't plan ahead (induction is not that new, especially when some of them only moved out from their parents in the last 5 to 10 years).
The induction kettle of friends definitely is much faster than both their old kettle (1.[2,5] kW) and ours (2.2kW); and I am not sure if they even have a 3.7kW field.
Edit: If course assuming that you eventually get a new stove anyway, at least at some point in the future. If you're settled in your house/flat for live and have a gas stove you're happy with & that will survive you, then the point is of course mood.
One of the nice features of any modern kettle is that it automatically and audibly shuts off after the water starts boiling, so you know your water is ready and you don't forget and get a burnt kettle from leaving it boiling for an hour. You won't get that with a passive induction kettle.
The claim that fridges from the 40s and 50s were very efficient is nonsense. Even a 10-20 year old fridge is very inefficient compared to a modern fridge. It's as easy as looking at energy star ratings.
> When it becomes a problem, it goes to the dump where all the foamed-together plastic parts will not be feasible to separate nor recycle.
It's never been economical / feasible to manually take apart an appliance for recycling. They're shredded and the plastic/metal chunks separated mechanically for the raw materials.
That doesn't seem like a fair comparison. It's like saying a bike is "pretty efficient" compared to an e-bike because it doesn't consume any energy (infinite efficiency!)
Do you think the manufacturers aren't gaming those ratings either?
The energy efficiency of fridges over time has definitely not been monotonic either. The ones that use the most were the late 60s-80s models that sacrificed insulation thickness for more interior volume.
Oh cmon, you can't categorically dismiss an entire government program with an offhand comment like that. You need to at least provide some sort of evidence supporting your claim.
/s
In the case of TVs, manufacturers game the numbers by rating efficiency "as shipped to the consumer at factory default settings." The manufacturer just sets the brightness to 20%, and throws a warning on the screen if the customer tries to change it, saying "the TV may use more energy". Of course, in the store, the TV is set to Store Mode, which means the brightness is often even higher than 100%, and the TV has a sticker about how efficient it is. Nobody would buy a TV that was dimmed permanently to the Eco Mode, but technically, you can "watch the very dim TV", so it counts.
This means that the composite "energy efficiency score" is not calculated with "output" or "work done" or "function realized" held constant. The text of the standards often does not define exactly the outcomes to be achieved.
Thus, it is entirely possible for a manufacturer to produce products with a degraded functionality in exchange for "better energy efficiency", regardless of whether worse functionality may cause the consumer to use the item for twice as long. (i.e. some government restricting the wattage of vacuum cleaners, which may cause vacuum cleaners to become less effective instead of more efficient, causing increased run time)
In the case of fridges, you might imagine how a manufacturer might skimp on "lasts long", "how much space the fridge takes compared to how much space is inside", and other things like this.
The plastics recycling industry is over 90% fraud, just like the carbon credits market.
There are thousands of cases of Australian garbage turning up in indonesia with trash bags marked with the name of the local authority responsible for managing it. Plastic from UK is either burned in Poland to power cement production, or is sorted in Turkey and send to the third world to kill children and sea turtles.
I throw plastic in the trash to make sure it never leaves the country, but stays here and goes into landfill and doesn't hurt anyone. And to make sure the true cost of disposing of it is paid.
>Plastic from UK is [...] sorted in Turkey and send to the third world to kill children and sea turtles.
So in other words, they're sending recycling to third world countries to be sorted because the cost of labor is cheaper, and those countries have bad waste management practices so the unrecyclable materials end up in rivers or whatever. I guess this counts as fraud if you think that putting something in recycling means that it'll definitely be reused somehow. Many people might even legitimately hold this belief. However, if you do a little bit of thinking you know this is an impossible goal/strawman. For one, people frequently miscategorize their recycling, which means things that can't be recycled end up in recycling. Obviously those won't be reused. Also, no recycling technology is perfect, and there's bound to be something that gets up too degraded/contaminated to be properly recycled. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any active efforts to portray recycling as some sort of 100% perfect waste remediation, so I'm not sure where the fraud angle is from. It's a case of mismatched consumer expectations at best.
If you are running any kind of business, say house insulation, you take money to fully insulate a house, don't insulate 90% of the house, and then attempt to mislead the customer into thinking the job is done, you have commited fraud or embezzlement.
If these companies are paid to recycle but recycling is not happening, then someone has commited fraud. Also the contract does not say 'you can dump unresycleable stuff into the ocean' - they are suppose to dispose of it properly.
It is their job to audit their supply chains and to make sure the job is done. If I know from public sources that majority of plastic that goes to their contractors in Turkey are commiting fraud, then a company with an army of lawyers knows it too.
If they continue using contractors in knowledge that their contractors are fradulent, but are telling me that plastic is being recycled, they are defrauding me. When major western media publishes a video of masked armed men chasing their reporters in Indonesia for investigating 'recycling', it should be clear to anyone that this is massive organised crime.
You don't get to blame this on 'those countries' because our countries are not doing shit either. We created the problem and we outsourced it by contracting literal mafia in Indonesia. Your taxpayer dollars are used to pay mafia bosses and to bribe Indonesian officials, sponsoring corruption in 'those countries'.
This is not just my opinion, there have been multiple investigations and convictions for recycling fraud.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/brothers-sentenced-for-14...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...
Okay, but even in your example of insulating a house, there are areas that can't be insulated. For instance, it'll be insanely expensive to insulate the studs themselves, because they're load-bearing. A reasonable consumer would understand that you can't replace the entire surface of a house with insulation, just like a reasonable consumer would understand that not everything they put in recycling is going to be recycled.
>If these companies are paid to recycle but recycling is not happening, then someone has commited fraud. Also the contract does not say 'you can dump unresycleable stuff into the ocean' - they are suppose to dispose of it properly.
Without specifics it's hard to argue either way. I'm not aware of recycling contracts that stipulate x% must be recycled. Can you provide some references here? Here in the US counties/cities only does recycling as a money-making measure. If they market rate for recycled outputs drops too much, some jurisdictions end up landfilling the recycling.
>https://www.gov.uk/government/news/brothers-sentenced-for-14...
Looking at the story it seems like it's less "taking e-waste and dumping it in a river somewhere" and more "submitting fraudulent invoices".
>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...
>The exporters make millions by charging retailers and manufacturers a fluctuating tonnage rate for plastic waste recovery notes – currently £60 a tonne. Retailers buy these plastic export recovery notes – Perns – to satisfy the government they are contributing something to recycling plastic packaging waste.
This seems like an issue with a government program intended to curb plastic waste, rather than consumers being misled. Prior to your comment I wasn't even aware of the existence of such a program. That's not to say the fraudulent behavior is acceptable, but it's slightly different than what we were originally discussing which is consumers being somehow deceived that what they put in recycling actually ended up in a river somewhere.
ignoring for a second that modern insulation is just blown onto whatever surface you want, and obviously doesn't affect load bearing properties,
the analogy is about doing 90% of your job and acting like you did 100% of it
even if you personally think that extra 10% is hard
even if you personally think that extra 10% shouldn't be your responsibility
you still have to do it for it to not be fraudulent
Then thats what you have to tell that to the client, and the client is free to look for a different proffeshional if he is not happy.
However if you lie, and client thinks thay you have insulated things that are impossible to insulate, thats fraud. And that's happening.
> I'm not aware of recycling contracts that stipulate x% must be recycled
Think about, whats the point of a recycling contract that says 'you could recycle only 0.1% if you feel like it'?
> we were originally discussing ... consumers being somehow deceived
that happens too. I have taken my old electronic goods to a commercial recycler. You have to pay to dispose of large appliances.
Now I realise there is about 60% chance that they took out and sold the valuable copper, and the rest is sitting in a river somewhere, leaching heavy metals and poisonong children
I agree fraud is happening in the UK, because the government specifically set up a market for recycling credits. However, I doubt consumers are thinking of that when they're chucking their appliances in the garbage bin. I myself were not aware of such a program, and unless such a program is widespread that example has limited applicability.
>Think about, whats the point of a recycling contract that says 'you could recycle only 0.1% if you feel like it'?
That's... basically how I treat most public recycling bins. They're some hopelessly contaminated with non-recyclables that I assume they're collected as trash. It's entirely unreasonable to expect that just because someone put something in the recycle bin, that the city would bend over backwards to ensure it's recycled. Again, I'm also not saying that there aren't people who actually believe that ("wishcycling" is a thing), but what I'm saying is that anyone who has given the topic a bit of thought would realize that:
1. not everything can be recycled
2. even something that could theoretically be recycled, can be contaminated so that it can't be recycled
3. recyclers are subject to economic constraints
4. therefore, it's entirely unreasonable to expect that everything that you throw in recycling ends up recycled
Applied to the original topic of appliances/electronics, this means that I expect they recycle the bits that are economically feasible to recycle, and toss the rest.
>that happens too. I have taken my old electronic goods to a commercial recycler. You have to pay to dispose of large appliances.
Right, but is the service you're paying for "getting rid of the electronics in a way that complies with local laws" or "getting rid of the electronics in a way that complies with local laws, and ensure that it gets properly recycled"?
So last year I had a lot of old electronics, I spesifically looked for a recycler, not a landfill.
I spesifically asked if they can recycle the old motherboard before handing it over. If they said no, I would go to someone else. I was prepared to pay a reasonable fee.
Maybe there is someone in Uk that does actually recycle 95% of the motherboard and charges £2 for their service, but they can't get any business because of all the fraudsters that pretend to recycle for free and actually don't
There is no way to distinguish between the 0.001% recycler and 100% recycler.
It's basically burning fossil fuel. Too bad about the dioxins though.
And yeah, I agree with them actually - there's no way 1950s compressors had such low failure rates.
I do recall seeing an american ad for some oven brand from the 50s, where the leaflet advertised that an average consumer shouldn't expect to repair it more than 2-3 times in a 5 year period - and that was advertised as a selling point!
It wasn't a "we can't make/ship big things with relatively low value density" factor (they made cars, after all) and I'm assuming they were making something for domestic consumption (or were they buying Whirlpool fridges for Tokyo apartments?). Was there some tarriff situation keeping them out of this sector?
I have a Panasonic washer and fridge. They're great.
>I'm assuming they were making something for domestic consumption (or were they buying Whirlpool fridges for Tokyo apartments?)
Whirlpool and other western brands have no presence in Japan for appliances. It's all Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, plus Haier, and for the cheap brand, Iris Ohyama. Virtually all appliances are made in Japan, or some (usually cheap ones) in China by Japanese companies.
They probably don't bother with the US because American consumers don't want to pay for quality, and they'd have to re-engineer everything for American sizes and preferences. American appliances look nothing like Japanese ones.
Is it even possible to lose this knowledge? Surely they know how to make good reliable products, they simply choose not to...
When there wasn't enough to go around, capitalism was amazing. It created tremendous wealth, such that for the first time in history, in large parts of the world, there's enough for everyone.
My theory is: Back then, the market for most goods was under-served, so the way the rich got richer was by creating more goods, since you could sell everything you could make (almost always at a profit).
However, in a saturated market, the incentives change; because you can produce far more than you can sell, the rich almost exclusively get richer by taking market share from other players. Making something last 50 years instead of 10 at a 1% cost premium becomes a bad idea, because people care about the headline figure.
It always comes down to supply and demand. Supply of generic products like compressors and blenders skyrocketed. Increase the supply enough and you get a race to the bottom. All market inefficiency has been squeezed out of the market. The market has arrived at an equilibrium of making some things just high enough quality that they last longer than a few months while being as cheap as possible. Anyone trying to make something higher quality gets squeezed out. Unless there's also much higher demand to compensate for it.
Most people have no cost-effective way to find out how long an appliance will last, so the market cannot find the most efficient lifetime for appliances.
Is this only true for fridges? Because this video on a 1984 washing machine versus one from today[0, timestamp relevant] shows a big difference in efficiency from then to now.
I think the actual difference is not quite so much.
If you were buying a $7k fridge today to compare - that’d be interesting.
Thinner vessels seem to be the main culprit. That does save a few dollars on materials costs.
best/Niklas
The modern production line is so efficient they can do that level of customisation for every market individually...
Then, importantly, stick to it and not ride laurels all the way down to the bottom of the barrel. And refuse to sell out to larger competitors who will then gut quality.
The reason it's on my Magic Billionaire list is because I cannot imagine I'd get the investment to set up a brand that isn't designed to squeeze every last penny out of the products, but rather simply provide "just good" products.
Total Adressable Market is the nerds who care, i.e. barely anybody.
On the other side, the thing is still working, but it's only been 8 years.
But I do agree about the TAM, which is why it's contingent on being an idle billionaire.
1. I don't need a digital clock or timer on my appliances
2. No loud beeps whenever a touch button is pressed or a dial is turned or when the microwave is done
3. No blue LEDs that somehow light up the whole room at night
4. Physical dials where it makes sense (temperature, time etc) instead of clunky touch crap
After my kid randomly pressed a bunch of buttons on our stove the alarm kept randomly turning on, sometimes in the middle of the night and I could not for the life of me figure out how to turn it off. But one day it stopped.
Plus points: you can turn the beep volume down.
Minus points: without a manual you would never in a million years figure out the magic sequence to get into the menu and when you did what the numeric menu codes mean.
Had a electric kettle that also beeped. I removed the piezo buzzer.
Physical dials will break eventually. The touch crap doesn't feel as good to use, but actually lasts longer if it's well made.
Later, when you mostly saturated your target market, you're mostly earning on the sales of spare parts (which you produce in bulk every few years and sell from your inventory). Also, you now have to enter the next market or let go of most of your people. That cycle then repeats, and maybe you re-enter a market to make the next version of a product.
Did you think about a kickstarter to bootstrap with a mechanically relatively simple product, and on which you could compete with a relatively small mark up? E.g. a coffee grinder over a fully automatic coffee maker; or probably something even more simple.
Honestly, I could not think of anything that would make me miserable more than battling up from ground level in this kind of market, using my few personal savings as collateral. Kind of the same reason I don't intend to get into politics.
Yes, I'm giving up on a chance to make something better, but I won't make anything better from an early grave.
I'm content to work for a company that I think is making good products. I have never worked for a company making cheap crap, and I hope I never will.
Maybe we both "just" need to find a niche (or simple enough) product that can be started as an extended hobby. But I fear these are often not very interesting or won't even make us millionaires. How about electric tooth brushes, have these any relevant flaws these days?
Another small thing: We have a cat toy that moves via vibration (they love it), but the 3 tiny 312-type cells only survive for at most 30m. We even tried those specced for hearing aids (180mAh instead of 30mAh), but they seem to have trouble with the current and don't live much longer; so using it is not only moderately expansive, but produces a lot of unnecessary waste. A small LiPo with USB-C charger could fit, but of course then the margin would drop sharply.
But I prefer useful contributions to society.
What I find absurd is the re-badging of appliances. A clothes dryer or a gas furnace is a very simple device. So simple, in fact, that you will find the same control board inside a wide variety of seemingly "different" products.
Though I'd say it's more a critique of the belief that "the market" must be "right": on the manufacturer/investor side that "immediately profitable" is the main goal and that "cheap right now" is the goal on the customer side. In fact this is now so normalised that customer and consumer are almost synonymous, even for things that should, by rights, outlive the customer without being consumed.
Both these views can be rational (if you, the company, go bust this year, you can't make a good product ever, and you, the customer, may well want a blender now, not in 10 years when you can afford one that will last another 20). But they result in a Hotelling's Law joint race to the bottom (with a froth of shatteringly expensive artisanal Veblen-esque goods more for fashion then utility at the opposite end).
Perhaps "the market's" view of value is not actually a good description of long term utility.
And probably the most galling part of this is that with same amazing manufacturing methods and process control used now to shave a product to just barely good enough not to be warranty returns, you could produce wonderful products on the other side of the line[1]. Probably for only a few percent off the bottom line. But then you'd get pounded into the economic sand by corner-cutters and double-dippers who sell multiple bad products to the same customers in sequence.
[1]: The difference between a MOSFET driver circuit that fails after a year and one that basically never fails could be pennies, say.
But assuming the 1. outcome is both morally "bad", 2. and a realistic prediction, 3. which happens to be a necessary consequence of capitalism; and also 4. it's safe to assume that moral judgement of the consequences also apply to the cause: Well then yes, if all 4 of these hold, then my post carries hidden criticism of capitalism ;)
If you're asking about inkjets, they're all a scam. Don't buy one.
Speed Queen washers come to mind. They are commercial washers that laundromats would install.
A home washer might cost $500. That’s what I spent and got 10 years out of an LG (and still going).
A Speed Queen might cost 2 to 2.5X that.
Most people don’t really care to buy it for life. $1200 now or $600 now isn’t a hard decision.
People will just take their chances.
This one surprised me. I need to do some digging. Did they get worse after the 50s? I know that an old fridge I had in the basement, probably from the 80s/90s, was horrible in that regard. It pulled 300W when the compressor was running, and about 20W when idle (why!?). I threw it out a long time ago, so I don't have the exact figures anymore, but over a day it consumed at least 3 to 5 times as much as the bigger one in my kitchen that was new at that time. And it was notably cooler in the basement too, so that should've worked in favor of the old one.
After the 50s, we demanded a larger volume, not just being larger but also sacrificing insulation and ideal hot-side placement. And we had to change the refrigerant used (and get rid of latching doors). Several features that were poor from an energy standpoint became standard (auto-defrost, air circulation).
Meanwhile my parents have a 25 year old aircon with heavy duty copper wiring that’s still going strong.
I’ll pay a premium for appliances that are simply built to last, but there’s nothing on the market built to that spec anymore.
I happen to like 'On' sport shoes, for the comfort and the design. And like clockwork, after 6 months of use (walking mind you) holes develop in the fabric where the shoe bends as you walk. First pair, I assumed it was a fluke. Second pair, it became clear it is inherent in the product. Send pictures to On sports and was told it is not covered by warranty. "Normal wear and tear". I guess it is Swiss Cheese Technology (tm)!
(p.s. these are not cheap shoes. And the company must be aware of this issue since my 2 pairs developed holes in the same precise place and clearly because the material they use can't repeatedly flex.)
This statement is very suspect without a citation, because since the 1970s, new refrigerator energy consumption has dropped 3x while volume has doubled [1]. As far as I can tell, fridge efficiency data from before then isn't available, but it's highly unlikely that compressors were more efficient even further back in time.
Some of the improvement in efficiency is undoubtedly much better insulation and seals, but the compressors have definitely become more efficient, which is also why refrigerators are so much more quiet today than they used to be.
1. https://www.energy.gov/articles/proof-pudding-how-refrigerat...
There are almost no functional household products on earth I'd choose an older version of, in fact I don't think I own anything that I wouldn't prefer over the older version.
But for some reason stuff other than cars and power tools that experience significant forces seem to at times get worse.
I guess everything is probably built with the same tech over craftsmanship mindset and there's a few things where that results in things not lasting.
Also, the inflation adjusted cost of a fridge in the 50s was something like $10k. A $10k fridge today (e.g. Sub Zero) will easily last for many decades. A $1k Wal-Mart special will not.
They are a status symbols, that’s why they cost so much, not because they are top quality.
My guess is your friends aren’t maintaining them properly (they know they have to clean the condenser coils every couple months, right?) Either that, or they have those “integrated” models with no visible vent for the condenser, which of course will overheat the compressors and electronics.
It also is designed such that you absolutely cannot clean the inner layers of the fan-cooled condenser coil without major disassembly of the fridge. The service panel on the front can be removed, but there is a metal fan shroud that is difficult to remove and turns what ought to be routine maintenance into an ordeal involving taking things apart and taking the built in fridge out of the wall. Whether this was deliberate or just an oversight, I don't know. There would have been many other simple and cost-neutral ways to implement this cover.
A 70 year old fridge that cost the equivalent of $10k today when new, and is likely to last over a century, is still a better value than replacing a $1k model a dozen times in the same timespan.
The other thing people forget is that older appliances and electronics were built to be easily serviced, and therefore the ones today that survive have been repaired at some point (most likely). Today, most of those dedicated repair shops are long gone and products are no longer designed to be serviceable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9H0MO-qS8
Given a more than order of magnitude reduction in price, a shorter lifespan can be tolerated, and could even be a rational consumer choice.
In general, I think it's almost always the case that compared to historical offerings, you can get an order or so drop in price, without sacrificing core lifespan. Sacrificing lifespan can be done, but for such devices, such sacrifices lead to saving an additional $10-$20 rather than $100-$200 -- those come from access to cheaper materials.
It's like buying shoes for $20 that you'll have to replace every year, instead of an $80 pair that last 10 years. It's a trap, and the goal should be to lift people out of it, rather than make an even worse $15 shoe, and so on.
Maybe people wouldn't use Kurig if they could still make their cup of coffee in 5 minutes instead of 10.
Then I'm sure you were relieved to discover that the author didn't!
From the link:
"The very early (30's and 40's) ones were less consistent in their life spans. I've seen a document on this somewhere and will share it if I run across it again. They didn't have the automated and consistent manufacturing processes like we have today. Some of them did go out early. The ones we still have today from the early days are the ones which were especially good, and are still in the long flat bottom of the failure bathtub curve.
"What I foresee killing off many of the 2000's compressors are the lower engineering margins in the design. It takes less of an incident to go beyond that margin into the region of damage and failure; as compared to earlier compressors with a larger engineering margin.
It also does not evaluate reliability of units from the 50s through the 2000s, which is apparently when everything became unreliable junk.
In order to properly control for survivorship bias, you need to tabulate reliability figures for each year (and for each price point). The handwaving assertion about manufacturing consistency does not do that in the slightest.
Both effects are at play in the real world, obviously.
Reply to edits:
>It also does not evaluate reliability of units from the 50s through the 2000s
"This isn't a massive cross-brand longitudinal study" is a pretty low-hanging critique.
Who could afford such a study?
>In order to properly control for survivorship bias, you need to tabulate reliability figures for each year (and for each price point).
Does any party have access to these data, realistically?
No, I am not. A $10k fridge from a premium manufacturer that makes no budget models will last decades. A $1k fridge from a budget manufacturer that produces no premium fridges will last a few years.
There are very few manufacturers that make models spanning the entire reliability (and thus price) gamut.
>Does any party have access to these data, realistically?
Probably not. Which is why we cannot assert with any solid evidence that appliance reliability has declined over the years—we have no way of conclusively ruling out survivorship bias.
How does that relate to survivorship bias?
>Probably not. Which is why we cannot assert with any solid evidence...
...anything.
If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.
You can always ask for better evidence, in any situation! Historically this has been exploited in denial campaigns (tobacco, climate change, etc), so there should be some wariness surrounding this rhetoric.
That said, N=1 here. Let's not make more (or less) of it than there is.
>we have no way of conclusively ruling out survivorship bias.
Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?
I hope I'm misunderstanding. If not, it's the fox guarding the henhouse.
You said that inter vs. intra brand survivorship bias didn’t matter. I think it does, since the former likely has a much bigger effect (models from premium brands generally last longer overall due to higher reliability, whereas random units from cheaper brands last longer due to pure chance).
>...anything.
>If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.
This is arguing in bad faith. There is a high level of evidence required to support the extraordinary claim that modern appliances are generally less reliable than old appliances, after controlling for price point. I believe a reasonable amount of evidence to support this claim would require unbiased sampling of a statistically significant number of appliance service records over the years. Otherwise, we’re just idly conjecturing.
That said, I take back my claim that the requisite evidence is unobtainable. We unequivocally know that cars have gotten much more reliable over the years, based on purchase frequency and service records (remember, cars’ odometers used to top out at 99999 miles because they weren’t expected to last longer). There is no reason we couldn’t do similar surveys with appliances.
>Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?
No, the corollary is that it would be equally difficult to infer if planned obsolescence has gotten more frequent over the years. That’s very different from being unable to detect planned obsolescence at all. It’s easy to inspect a particular appliance (or line of appliances) and find evidence of premature failure points, as the linked article nicely did.
i cant even imagine why you would downvote this. are you the one agreeing with OP's "no evidence" claim, or are you just some frothing idiot consumer who is upset that your little purchases arent being extolled as they usually are?
- fridge
- oven
- dishwasher
- freezer
- hairdryer
- vacuum cleaner
- mixer
- coffee machine
- and even a microwave oven that's been in use daily since 1984!
The notable exception being the toaster (thrown away when we learned it had asbestos in it very close to the bread) and the washing machines.
> A $10k fridge today (e.g. Sub Zero) will easily last for many decades.
I wouldn't take a bet on it. Especially because luxury stuff are targeting a wealthy audience who often change their still fully functional appliance after a few year to buy “better” ones (bigger, additional feature, or even just a design that isn't out of fashion), they have very limited incentive in making things that last several decades, it just needs not to die during the typical ownership duration. Related trivia: the most expensive Hermès handbags are really fragile because the crocodile skin is untreated, and if you carry them outside when it rains, every drop will leave a stain. That doesn't seem to negatively affect their business in any way.
That being said, it is true that household appliance used to cost much more back then, and people where willing to pay that much money. That's the tragedy of competitive markets for commodities: it's a race to the bottom.
I inherited a 12+ year old one one with my apartment and have been able to strip it down to its circuit boards to clean, maintain, and repair it when needed which I love.
The bad thing is the company treats itself like a luxury car brand so OEM parts are a fortune ($400 for a shelf!) and if you aren't interested in doing the work yourself the certified repair guy is going to rake you over the coals like a luxury German auto dealer's service department for simple repairs.
Luckily, like with luxury car brands, the resale value of all the parts is basically $0 so you can get used parts (or even entire used appliances) super cheap and there are lots of compatible parts out there on amazon for reasonable prices (I recently had to replace the compressor switch which took about 10 minutes and a $10 part but would have been $200+ to have a tech show up).
Net-net it's the best fridge I've ever owned but even so I'm not sure I would have chosen to shell out the $12k for it if I had been the original buyer.
In my experience appliances are a lot more efficient and cheaper than they used to be. My new stainless steel fridge has much more capacity while using the same amount of power than the 20yo one it replaced (Which didn't actually fail, but the white coating was rusting all over the place).
My HE washer doesn't fill the entire tub compared to the old upright ones, so my water heater is used less, and spins at ~1,200rpm, greatly reducing dry times for my electric dryer. The recessed lighting in my house went from 90 watts per bulb to 12 watts for LED, and saves me $$ on cooling when needed. My tankless water heater heats up only the water being used, no more, no less.
I'm paying roughly 32¢/KW all-in (after taxes, fees etc.) for electricity in the Bay Area, so efficiency gains build up quickly over time.
Anecdotally, the only issues I've had so far have been with poorly engineered Samsung refrigerators, where the fans would seize due to ice buildup, not mechanical wear.
turbokinetic agrees modern refrigerators are more energy efficient but at the expense of longevity and not worth it
> I am saying that this compressor, and its application, show clear engineering choices made, which sacrificed its life span in the name of some modicum of energy savings.
Without numbers to back up that claim, that's just their opinion, as is mine. I my experience the energy savings have been significant enough for that to not be a big concern.
There may be an environmental argument here of course, but that's a separate argument than what consumers feel in their pocketbook.
I think we're in agreement, however, I don't think an analysis has been made either way to be able to make this claim. The old appliances you see could just be due to survivor bias, while the broken ones were unceremoniously disposed of. Perhaps the old appliances were simpler and cheaper to repair, but perhaps new appliances need less repairs in the first place. Without an actual analysis this is just speculation.
A related example would be laptops and cell phones, which have become more complicated, less upgradable, and harder to repair over time (soldered parts, glue etc.). However, cell phones are now commonly waterproof, which has eliminated a major reason for replacement. Laptops basically have no moving parts other than the keyboard and screen hinge now, and stay useful much longer due to chips being really fast in the last decade.
My energy company gave be a multi-hundred dollar rebate to upgrade to an HE washer, so it was objectively better for my wallet to upgrade. Now I'm using less water, gas, and electricity when doing laundry. About a few hundred a year less on top of the rebate I got upfront.
The tankless water heater has no pilot light, so there's some savings there, but the real benefit was having unlimited hot water. Tankless water heaters are rated to last longer than tanks, allegedly, but I haven't had one long enough to know either way.
Incandescent to LED was a no-brainer, each pair of LED lights was about $30 at costco and use 14% of the energy. They have already more than paid for themselves, not including the money saved by needing to run the AC less.
Also, the assertion that mid-1900s compressors were efficient is absent any facts to back it up. If the main power-consuming part of old refrigerators was so efficient, how can newer refrigerators be so much more efficient? Sure, better insulation can help, but I don’t see how you get around that newer compressors need so much less power to get the job done.
Smaller, fewer features, less moving parts. Avoid gimmicky features that your grandparents never needed.
I'm a real cheapskate when it comes to appliances and have yet to have one crap out on me.
My favorite recent buy was a Victory range hood with mechanical switches and no PCB. More like this please.
Digital thermostats are far more reliable than mechanical ones, as well as more consistent. There are surely other cases where solid state electronics (which have PCBs) replacing mechanical systems have improved the reliability of appliances. So your rule of thumb is surely contrary to reality.
Replacing a standard thermocouple is trivial. Replacing a PCB may not even be possible if the part isn’t being produced. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but I’d still rather have the thermocouple in most cases.
Let's not forget about software in these IoT times. Yes there is a phone app. But will it be there in 10 years?
Unfortunately, the success of price as a simplifying mechanism also hides all of the information from which the price emerged. This makes it almost impossible to determine whether the price is low because the materials are poor quality, or because the labor was underpaid, or because environmental standards were bypassed through offshoring, or because the manufacturing process was particularly efficient. Clearly we hope it is due to the latter, but determining so amounts to solving the economic calculation problem.
But, rather than abandoning all hope, I believe the answer lies in consumers demanding supply chain transparency. This isn’t going to enable an efficient planned economy, but it might enable individuals to make better decisions about the purchases for which they care most.
Actually planning the economy is a polynomial time problem to solve exactly for linear situations, and ~n*log(n) to approximate fairly well both for linear and nonlinear situations. Consumer demand is solved by using markets for everything except capital.
And so revealing accurate information turned out to be by far the most difficult task, at which planned economies routinely suffered catastrophic failures. For example, the USSR overestimated grain production by around 2x for the Holodomor due to misreporting and lies at every single level (the ensuing catastrophic and tyrannical resource distribution is a whole other topic). Until the 1990s, Soviet planners highly valued US spy informations on their economic situation as it was vastly more reliable than their own.
Planned economies are far more reliant on this data of course, and that is why they are far more affected. Actually finding a sufficiently efficient organisation of production is not that big of a challenge either in theory or in practice, the issue is mostly figuring out exactly what you've got to organize.
Unfortunately Mises did not have the algorithmic intuition to figure out that the calculation part is completely doable (even when you assume a perfect efficient market which is theoretically impossible unless P=NP and entropy stops existing and even then only for linear systems, the exact solution can be found at worst in cubic time to the number of industries).
Sounds time consuming.
I had it with a car door opening mechanism - something you interact with countless times during a day. Less than an inch long. Surprised it lasted as long as it did.
There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.
I would pay a crazy amount of money to subscribe to a service provided by a professional reverse-engineering outfit that takes the Consumer Reports concept to the next level, with highly technical teardowns and critical analysis of a wide variety of products that covers everything from the BOM to the firmware.
This kind of thing happens sporadically -- e.g., some of the Juicero postmortems offered a lot of engineering insight. And there is no shortage of passionate amateurs like AvE who don't have a consistent methodology and/or don't always have the domain expertise needed to give a given product design a fair assessment.
What's needed is a consistent, professional, and above all objective approach to informing the purchase decisions of technically-literate consumers.
I have a dorm refrigerator that was purchased in 1986. It survived numerous moves and ex-girlfriends but is still going strong. I currently have it sitting in my office as my drink fridge. Wife has been asking I throw it out. Hell no.
1. An uneducated consumer cannot distinguish between the two. Both products will bear labels reading "Extremely high quality, we take pride in our work, energy efficient AND better quality than all our competitors!"
2. Brands and manufacturers are taking these shortcuts uniformly. So consumers can't simply rely on buying a machine of a certain brand.
3. These issues don't show up for (apparently) 13 years! Even IF a consumer identifies a brand with a strong evidence-based reputation for quality, that brand may have lowered standards sometime in the past 13 years and they would have no way of knowing.
The reasons everyone has a fridge today isn’t because everyone is rich, it’s because fridges are cheap.
Two things that _are_ real issues are
- Compensation includes benefits, and much of the increase in compensation has been eaten up by healthcare costs. This means wages haven't increased nearly as much.
- There is a growing gap in productivity inequality within labor which has led to growing income inequality. Those productivity and income increases have disproportionately gone to the upper percentiles of workers.
This goes counter to what I have read. For example: "Net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while a typical worker’s compensation grew by 15.8%, according to EPI data..."
https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
- The productivity and compensation graphs are often inflation-adjusted using incomparable deflators. Productivity is measured using a GDP inflator (which includes investments) whereas compensation is measured using a CPI deflator (which only includes consumer products). CPI is historically higher[1] which means compensation is artificially being deflated more than productivity.
- The most well-known graph from the EPI[2] shows productivity for all workers but shows compensation for only 80% of workers, with the provided reason being to exclude high earners like management and executives. Which, sure I guess, but surely the two metrics should be kept consistent.
If you correct for these errors you end up finding a productivity/compensation gap that is much smaller than the EPI claims, though notably not zero. The EPI themselves have a figure that includes all workers and uses matching deflators ([3], figure C, "Real producer average hourly consumption") so perhaps some of the blame here is on readers.
I think this BLS paper on the subject[4] is well worth a read. An interesting result they found is that the industry with the greatest productivity/compensation gap is...computing. Probably not the jobs people usually imagine when they think of stagnating pay.
1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/comparing-the-cpi-...
2. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
3. https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
4. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...
If your competition makes a shitty fridge for $1000 with bearing that will fail at 15 years on average, and you make the exact same thing with bearings that will last 30 years for $1010, most people will look at the exterior, say “these look the same”, and buy the competitors model.
And you can advertise that all you want, and next week your competition will put $3 of extra steel in the door handle to make it feel more solid than yours and write the word “professional” on the door. Now your product looks like a bad deal.
Now you might say that people are making bad decisions. But are they really? Most Americans don’t keep their house for 30 years, so why do they care if the fridge fails before then? It’s someone else’s problem.
This is why market positioning is a complicated discipline. It isn’t just “make a good thing for a good price”
I am keen to research stuff online more. I avoided buying the more expensive "Zip" water system, and instead got a RO system and my own chiller. An RO system is mostly plastic and pipes, with most of the $ going into the cartridges. So good value for money. Ugly... but it is under your sink so who cares.
It was cheaper (about 1/3 of the price all up), and all the Zip users bemoan how unreliable it is. I also remember anecdotally how many times I have seen an out of order tap of theirs in an office or other place. They also don't filter quite as well as an RO (but they do filter well enough if taste is the concern).
You don't always get better buy paying more, or going with the famous brand. I think you have to research all the things.
If you really want something engineered differently, you need to look at something where cost is not prioritized, which won’t be something that costs 20% more, or even 100% more. It’ll probably cost at least an order of magnitude more at least.
Start making quality appliances that work, are serviceable and affordable (maybe financing?). There seems to be a market and I think lots of people would be happy to work in an American factory making quality stuff for American homes.
This tongue-in-cheek comment is inspired by relatives who actually have two kitchens: One in the house with the store and manufacturing space (with space for 6 people to eat), one in the house they live in (and about twice as big, with no sitting space). The former is used all the time (often it's "the boss" cooking for the employees and visitors), and the other one, well... she said they don't actually need it, but he enjoys cooking a lot and is really good at it, so a spacious and nice kitchen was his treat for their successful store (it happens to look representative as well, but the purpose is actual cooking).
Thirteen years doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Not great, but not bad. That 80-year-old fridge the repair shop guy is bragging about is almost certainly not an auto defrost unit. So, sure, it's probably close to a modern fridge in power consumption but the tradeoff is you'll have to scrape ice out of it periodically.
https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrig...
Edit:
Pretty early on I got a couple wireless temperature probes and used rtl-sdr to pipe the data into a TimescaleDB instance (and slapped Grafana in front of it).
I have no idea what the actual problem was because LG was keen on a refund over a repair. The symptoms were failure to cool and ice buildup on the evaporator getting into the fan and making a racket. The tech diagnosed a bad thermistor which brought the freezer temp during defrost down from 50°F to about 30–40°F. Even though the tech took a steam gun to the evaporator, it took about two weeks before enough ice built up and fell into the fan again. At this point the fridge wasn't getting below 40°F either and my landlord decided to take them up on the refund offer.
Could've been a bad compressor as one of the failure modes is inability to pump refrigerant. The compressor itself sounded like a ringing bell. I stopped caring because nobody at LG cares and they are not positioned to actually service their appliances. It's likely a design flaw they either already know about or don't want to know about. Getting through to a person empowered to do anything is nearly impossible and their techs have a miserable time trying to get parts from their poorly run warehouses. I'm a bit apprehensive that other companies have joined the race to the bottom, but for now LG is solidly in never again territory for me.
I've a 2003 build Whirlpool fridge that's been just fine. In that era the defrost logic is usually mechanical and if/when the defrost timer fails it's a $30 part that's fairly easy to replace.
The LG that I just junked uses electronics to control the defrosting. That gets expensive to fix but (I think) that's also not what failed in that piece of crap.
All three are more annoying to deal with than a fridge where you just know you gotta defrost it now and then (chest freezers still had that for longer, maybe still do).
Good news was it encouraged us to clean out our fridge on a regular basis!
I eventually fixed it by ordering a new thermistor and relocating it on the line (I read about it in a service bulletin somewhere)
I also replaced the warming probe at the bottom just in case it was blocking up but I don’t think that was the root cause.
Once I took those actions, the fridge worked great. Unfortunately we now no longer have a clean refrigerator, however.
How do you increase total profit on an item? You either increase market share, or you reduce unit cost.
When you start out, the first of these is the better choice (not least because you're trying to build a reputation). When you're mature, the second is.
There's a guy called AvE on youtube whose tool teardowns illustrate this really well. The top-end tools obviously have different design goals - stuff like easily replaceable sacrificial components that are designed to fail, so expensive components are saved.
i refuse to believe such a logical argument
If they're competing on sales, then they need to optimize for the point at which it can break without losing brand confidence.
Refillable Ink-jet - a very low cost per page, indeed. After some time (approx 2y - warranty time in the EU; 5-6k pages/year), it started having an issue feeding paper, press the button to retry, it may work - frustrating, I know. 'Till one day it stopped altogether. It took me some time to figure it out - in short the tension springs were anemic to a high extent. So no tension on the paper rolls - no feed. Replacing the springs with imported ones (around 5-6 times more tension force) has made the printer not skip a page.
The original springs like 1 cent together. The replacement cost was like 40cent for 10 - retail. There is no way the manufacturer was unaware.
I think his name is Chris, actually. Other than that, the infamous inverse bathtub curve.
Ok, his channel is called AvE.
Of course! As most normal humans would. (being named "Arduino vs Evil" would be rather harsh to a boy)
There is an early video about a water pump (BOLTR - La BOMBA!) and a following one, trying to claim the warranty.
I don't know why, but finding these little communities of people is amazing to me. That there are so many people who derive true enjoyment from this random thing I've never really bothered to think about much. To me it's just a means to an end, nothing more than another object in my life. It's amazing to think there are probably communities around all sorts of things I hardly notice nor think about. Like doors to worlds I've never seen, hidden all around me in plain sight.
It's like the Terry Love forums, which are an outstanding resource for septic/well owners. But the forum regulars are all professional plumbers and well drillers.
Reviews have effectively become meaningless. There's so many contenders in each category releasing so many products frequently that reviewers are playing catch-up but are also overwhelmed. They can only spend a short amount of time per product which makes most reviews superficial. As a shopper, it's become impossibly hard to find good products. Most reviews just read out the specs, they explain what it is, not how good it is.
In the rare case that you do find a good one, its production lifespan is very limited, so you can't buy it again. Or it can't be repaired as nobody knows how, or there's no parts.
Most products can't even be serviced at all, as not only is there no knowledge, the repair cost would exceed the production cost. Even the idea "buy local for better service" no longer applies. They can't fix it either, they'll handle it exactly the same way as a larger retail channel.
There barely is a distinction anymore between A brands and B brands. Same limited lifespan.
Even A brands get away with gross usability defects as effectively there isn't much of a feedback loop. By the time a product is widely considered to be bad, the next one is already there. Even if you were to consider boycotting a brand, you'll soon learn the other brands are no different, exceptions aside.
Yes, the bearing has failed.
But I suspect it was caused by a substantial DC electrical current running through the motor on top of the AC current it was designed for.
A DC current in many motor designs causes a large sideways force, and that caused the bearing to wear.
DC currents can be caused by improper wiring or another faulty device in the house (or even in a neighbour's house)
Normally this DC current will mostly be absorbed by the utility pole transformer, which has a very low impedance at DC. However, if some of your house/street wiring has a few ohms of impedance, then the current can end up doing through more local devices like fridge compressors.
Normally this causes them to overheat pretty quick if the current is large. But a smaller current will eventually cause bearing failure.
This is a good thing because now I gotten pretty good at cooking some of the dishes at home.
Do you also think anyone who says Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t good coffee is “brainwashed”?
Sounds like what I've been noticing in grade school education. Perfect grades for everybody! Just please move on and don't check for any actual knowledge acquisition.
Was trying to buy a table. Wasn't satisfied with what I could find in the shop. Went to the restaurant embedded within the shop. Nice sturdy tables there. Unfortunately, not for sale.
The good stuff is out there.
The problem is that not only is the longevity hard to assess from reputation any more, it's that replacement parts and labor are so problematic as well.
I (and others I know) have had a simple washing machine circuit panel burn out because of simple overloaded pumps, etc. (or you might experience this with a dishwasher, refrigerator, etc). Just to get the part is now several $100s, and another $150+ for any kind of labor visit.
I am rapidly thinking that home warranties where they cover a certain set of your appliances is starting to be worth it.
A home warranty with good service is possible, but it won't be cheap.
Wrong. Fixing every broken item (~15 in all) would have cost over $400. Just for some plastic.
Of course manufacturers often trade quality in favor of margins, but I wonder how much the decline in consumer products has to do with the proportion of people on the 'poor' end of "Boots Theory" for goods like refrigerators, blenders, dishwashers, etc.
With income in the US practically stagnant for going on half a century and the sheer number of categories of "required" goods going up (e.g. phones, computers, TVs), everyone has a whole lot less to spend on a fridge and making a quality unit most people can't afford isn't a way to do business.
I replaced it with a Maytag commercial 2 years ago, the cousin to the speed queen, and have been very happy so far as there's no longer dozens of hidden compartments to trap mold, as far as I know...
It fell on my head when the last screw let go unexpectedly. And it was far heavier than I was expecting about 15 pounds for a 24 inch by 12 inch light frame. I think it's made of steel I was expecting flimsy light tin.
So yeah that was one durable light 52 years of operation.
Food and shitty food are both called food but they are not the same thing. Their sameness is a trick of language.
Today, corporations sell products that will break just to force you to buy another one. And they do this while spending millions in marketing to tell people how environment friendly they are.
what changed? Hard to believe that can't be done today.
Buying quality appliances and tools is a form of art and pretty much you have to tear them down to check about the said quality. It's quite disheartening. Then buying spare parts is another major issue.
But of course the customer is at fault for this environmental misuse of resources.... right? We should shoulder the expense of cleaning up the mess that corporations and governments create.
^ That is the corporate/governmental plan - spin the problem as an environmental issue that the consumer pays for! (Again.) And extract even more money from the customer in the process as they get rid of servicable products in favour of echo-friendly ones. Make laws to force them to do this too! It's a win win for the corporations!
Edward Bernays, 1930
I believe that competition in the future will not be only an advertising competition between individual products or between big associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of propaganda.
Edward Bernays, 1930
The sad truth is most people in most companies are just lemmings which creates the illusion of collusion, when really, it's just a whole lot of unoriginality.
You should read some of his other quotes - it's all very conspiratorial before that was even a term: https://libquotes.com/edward-bernays/works/propaganda
Here's a good one:
> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Edward Bernays
Obviously, it's not a strategy that will be much discussed, as its such an unappealing prospect. But the situation we find makes far greater sense as a conspiracy than companies merely stupid (which I agree is a part).
For example, a few years back there was a craze around workout wristbands (Jawbone Up, Fitbit, etc) and I'll never forget seeing Under Armour try to ship their own clone [2] and shouted (loud enough to startle the people I was with, not the rest of the store), in their store, "why the hell would you do that?!" The reason for the outburst was that I imagined the expenditure to make the thing—in terms of salaries, consultants, logistics, etc—dwarfed the actual sales (which any self-respecting CEO not caught in a mimetic haze would realize immediately).
[1] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/SilentWeaponsForQuie...
[2] https://www.kohls.com/product/prd-2569108/under-armour-band-...
The thing is though, we don't WANT to do that. If we knew we could get better quality by paying more, I think many would. But I don't trust that, so I just accept that my new fridge will last not very long, and I get the one that's recommened.
And the problem with this is of course that you can't win by making a fridge and claiming it lasts longer because it would be decades before anyone trusts you. A brand that bet on being the long life fridge brand selling expensive fridges would have a hard time building that reputation.
LEGO bricks used to be made to withstand nuclear holocaust because, well, the Engineers though they should be 'durable'.
It was hard to convince them to scale back a bit.
They are still 'durable' as anyone walking with bare feet near children can attest, but just not quite as invulnerable as before.
They saved a lot without compromise.
Fridges may not need to last 30 years, it costs a lot to do so, so let consumers decide.
What should happen is something about 'lifetime and warranty'.
Some people might want 'long lasting things' in which case we should be able to clearly differentiate.
You see this everyday, it has become very hard to find great manufacturing quality on every kind of product, from appliances to phones, cars, even mundane stuff like a lemon juicer or a light fixture. Everything at market prices is not built to last more than a handful of years.
Wallmart + China has changed the world, middle and lower class people now have material abundance that was unthinkable in the past.
I mean 'too much stuff'.
If we can get to the point of being able to recycle materials effectively, I'm fine with it becoming normative.
"The Robot made me this really great cappuccino machine it breaks in 6 years but that's fine because I want the new one, with the newer features"
Or "The Robot made me this 'metric' wrench system for really cheap, which won't last long, but that's fine, I use it literally not even once a year around the house, but I really do value having it around and available"
Whether one can do something about it ? I guess one can enforce warranty times to be longer for example. For sure that'll make things more expensive, but probably not by much. Maybe there are other solutions (like asking to collect statistics on life-times of appliances for easier comparisons), but the key is to put that factor in the company's calculations.
I have a washer and dryer from 1993 that are still going strong, but over the years I have had to replace belts, or idler pulleys. I have had to replace hot surface igniters, and the fan impeller in the dryer. But over all they have held up well. But neither one has any digital logic. They both use old school mechanical timers.
Our washer acted up briefly about ten years ago. Was making a hammering noise during agitation, and we called an appliance repair guy to look at it. He told us to run it until it quit, and left us with recommendations for two manufacturers of washer/dryers that still build units with mechanical timers. He said those will run as long as our current units. The noise sort of went away after a few months, and the washer still runs.
Flip side, I have helped two friends diagnose controller board failures on touch pad controlled ovens. One was the relay driver. The other was actually a failed membrane push button in the display, it was stuck active. In both cases, the ovens were less than five years old.
And the guy the looked at our washer said basically the same thing. The vast majority of his service calls are for failed control modules.
In another example, we replaced our 20 year old microwave with a modern LG (we moved house and the old microwave didn’t fit). The LG faulted within 15 months of use.
1: Energy regulations
2: Transition from high-cost luxuries to being more common (Similar to air travel)
3: Massive increase in global competition
The first one is really easy to see in the commercial space especially. Do things like plastic fan blades and VFDs make units more efficient? Yes. Do they also make them more likely to fail/add new failure points? Yes.
The energy regulation on consumer and commercial appliances is very strong in the US. If you compare even things like washing machines, you can see energy usage dropping hundreds of watts in some cases.
However, that has come at the cost of reliability.
As for #2, airplanes are a great comparison. At one time they were a luxury and you expected a certain level of service. As they got more affordable, that dropped away and people get packed in like sardines. That's the price of making it available to everyone.
Today isn't like the period when a washing machine was a luxury good. Now everyone has one - so the motivation is to produce them as cheaply as possible to undercut competition.
Reliability and energy usage aren't mutually exclusive, but because of #2 a cheap, less reliable way of saving power will almost always be taken over a more robust yet still efficient design.
These two explanations combined with a bit of Hanlon's razor explain almost all of modern appliance unreliability.
There is no active attempt to make units less reliable - but there's no motivation to do otherwise for most manufacturers given the shear amount of cheap competition present.
A few years ago I replaced my dishwasher with a European one. It was great, quiet. Then, it wasn't. I learned because it doesn't have a heating element and you have to load the dishes in a particular way to have a chance at maximum drying.
I listened to the service technician go on about the particular way to use this machine for about 20 minutes and asked them if I bought a decent dishwasher to think about my dishwasher, or to never think about my dishwasher again.
Since then, I've has had to replace the key convector to open and close it for it to run. Based on other well engineered products and European brands, I'm comfortable that the failure is engineered to ensure my LTV to the brand is longer.
Perhaps a European car that falls apart after a certain amount of mileage is a status symbol for some. They are wonderful to drive, but I have better things to do.
Is it so humid that you need one? I find the need for one absurd since I never used a machine with one and place everything in the correct orientation subconsciously.
The problem is they aren't built to last well nor be economically repairable. I'd take one or the other (or both!).
I has Whirlpool washing machine that lasted more than 20 years. When it finally gave up the ghost I bought a Fisher and Paykel that literally within 2 months of the 2 year warranty expiring. To their credit, Fisher and Paykel replaced it but even so.....
re: laundry, did you ever consider getting a second whirlpool? either way, what about the paykel outweighed 20 years of reliability?
I've now decided to buy the very cheapest possible fridge in the future.
Expensive still seems to be shit, so it may as well be cheap and shit.
Damn that explains why it didn't keep food cold.
>> e: laundry, did you ever consider getting a second whirlpool? either way, what about the paykel outweighed 20 years of reliability?
Can't recall why I didn't get another Whirlppol - maybe they are out of business now because their products lasted too long? Regardless, no doubt in the 20 years sense then they would have switched to the same cheap crap manufacturing as everyone else.
The guide for fridges here is in between 6 and 13 years. Under 6 you should not have any issues arguing with them (they will), over 6 it might take some more effort.
I did not know that, and, living in Australia I should take advantage of that!
I remember when a range could be expected to last a couple of decades at least. They aren't... complicated.
I think it's purely a trade off with doing its job and be cheap as possible but having a spare part available for it.
I remember reading somewhere about the cost of something in a VW engine bay, maybe an air intake box, they designed it to last X long,like the entire life span of the car, but it costs more to achieve, but it would have been cheaper to just design it for less life and if/when it did break you'd just replace the part and it's cheaper overall.
Repair tech said to contact a Frigidaire even though it has no warranty. He said he’s seen a stack of compressor failures on relatively new fridges.
What's ridiculous is the lack of reasonably-priced replacement parts. I tried to get the fridge repaired, and the cost of a new compressor + the cost of having someone swap it was more than the cost of an entire new fridge.
By the time you have a reputation for quality products, you're often acquired or out of business. There are actually cases of this in some specialty equipment.
Really: I’ve talked to commercial product managers who bemoan the fact that all their customers are perfectly happy with the 10-20 year old instrument they have. There’s no revenue there.
I got pretty angry to be quite honest. All the damage to the environment! The labour wasted in installing, attempting repairs, throwing out etc. Even worse if you paid lots of $$ to have the thing installed by a professional.
And don't get me started on new fan-dangled plumbing connections that involve large amounts of rubber adapters that shrink over time and causes untold damage.
One thing I decided is to try to avoid plastic, favouring timber every time (e.g. seating, boxes)
- inverter compressors versus scroll compressors
- defrosting cycles
- multi airflow technologies (there have been posts of Arduino controlled fans to circulate air in 90s)
In the last decade we've gone from a poor airflow, static compressors to normal consumer features including door alarms, thermometers, dynamic compressors, and multi flow fans
Capped are cheap and don’t last long (they have a vent on top) and when they blow they spread white residue on the board. The solid capacitors don’t suffer from this, last much much longer but do cost a bit more.
Ps. Maybe someone with more electrical knowledge than I can confirm or debunk this?
A few years ago I did an experiment: I downloaded the video and re-uploaded it to Youtube just to enable the subtitles, but I got a warning because of copyright violation, so I don't do that anymore.
Contrast with the 40 year old crockpot we only retired because I cracked the pot while cleaning it.
Here's how it works:
1) Each item has a unique serial number, and a database for storing maintenance records about the item.
2) When the item is going to be resold, third parties including the original manufacturer sell warranties on the item to protect the new owner. A manufacturer would inspect, refurb, and re-warranty on each iteration.
3) The new buyer pays more for the item, and the warranties on top of that, because they're getting goods closer to new goods in performance.
4) The manufacturers are profiting every time the goods are resold, possibly as much or more than selling a new one.
We think this model of the circular economy is a lot more likely to succeed than the current model which involves ripping things down to their raw materials then reusing those materials to manufacture new things.
https://mattereum.com/circular-economy/ <--- more here
Sorry, the problem you mentioned is 100% valid, but the NFT-based solution you are offering is a pure grift.
Someone could beat Consumer Reports by just purchasing & publishing the raw data (warranties sold, claims made, claims paid).
How do you solve this problem in a way that consumers aren’t paying for all these externalities?
EDIT: didn’t even see the crypto connection, that answers that question.
Talk about survivorshirt bias.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DpnnLQNgUiQ
Maybe we can switch links? @dang
So maybe it's not as bad as the post seems to make it.
¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Expensive appliances share most guts with cheaper models...spending more doesn't mean higher quality anymore