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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

I know it’s too late for you, but I have a personal rule that’s served me very well: never touch any Samsung device ever. You can’t avoid the chips they make as part of other devices or appliances but that seems ok.

The Samsung branded appliances and devices however are total garbage and Samsung dgaf. It might actually be part of their business model.

I have rarely heard someone say how happy they are with their Samsung anything, especially not their fridges and other appliances. “Built to fail” is something that often comes up, however.

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My dad has repeatedly installed samsung appliances, especially one of their dishwashers, in all his housing projects (as a general contractor) because they are "very quiet". Meanwhile, ever single one of them, for two decades now, fails and becomes useless within a year because a stupid water level sensor is exposed to the dishwasher environment in such a way that it gets dirty and tells the system computer to not do anything. "It's an easy fix" he says. If you replace the part, it will just fail again.

I think he might be stupid. He does not get a kickback for this.

Does he get paid to install / repair?

I like their SSDs, and haven't had any Samsung ram modules fail, but yeah, for anything else, I avoid the brand.

Yeah Samsung semis are ok (but not their phones!), however I avoid anything Samsung out of principle whenever I can.

It's so sad to see such a rapid decline. In the early 2000s every Samsung device I bought was well made and unbreakable.

Every Samsung device I have bought since maybe 2010 including my refrigerator and dishwasher have been total junk. I've had our refrigerator repaired so many times in the last 8 years it's just unreasonable.

We "bought" a Samsung fridge last black friday. Something extraordinary happened. Their system failed to deliver us the fridge. We had to reschedule the delivery since we were staying at the parents' for Thanksgiving a few extra days. It just never got delivered. It seemed like it was XPO's screwup, but it was hilarious to me that they could not get their system working well enough to even get the fridge to show up at our house.

Screw Samsung.

You might have dodged a bullet!

I have a neighbor who does external lighting. Highly recommends Samsung lighting because it outlasts everything else he has used previously.

I would like to know which fridge company is the most reliable. My samsung fridge and washer/drier bought in 2013 are still running good. I heard bad things about LG compressor in fridges, but their cordless vacuum is outstanding. I will probably never trust GE.

I bought at least 5 or 6 LG linear inverter compressor refrigerators since 2019 and they are all going great, with zero noise.

I think they had issues with their initial models, but they may have improved them. I mainly stick to LG appliances from Costco. But I also avoid getting appliances with fancy features like see through doors and crap. I don’t even get ice dispensers, just the ice bucket inside the freezer works.

Just get a single door convertible or a top freezer bottom fridge style. Something made for commercial use can also work. Complexity is the enemy of reliability.

The reason freezers are at the top isn’t because it’s best to have frozen food at eye level, it’s because that’s where the refrigerant expands and is coolest and then it takes on heat as it condenses again and descends through the fridge.

Convertibles are great because you can have either a fridge or a freezer with the flip of a switch. Get 2 of them and you have way more space for about the price of a french door fridge.

I buy ge/whirlpool/Electrolux/Maytag and just plan on doing repairs with cheap available parts

I think the reason why fridges are so bad now is because manufacturers are chasing foods energy efficiency ratings. And to do so they basically put an underpowered compressor in it so that it uses less energy per unit of volume and achieves a better rating. The problem is that this drives the compressor too hard but just enough so that it generally fails after the warranty expires. That’s what I was told.

Same as how far manufacturers will make their cars heavier on purpose to achieve a better energy rating because the formula is basically engine power divided by total car weight. So a big engine on a small car has a worse rating that the same engine on a heavier car.

Anyway, another good tip I heard was to talk to appliance repair shops and ask them which ones they repair the least. And that’s the ones that are worth buying.

… and for washing machines the efficiency rating is apparently based on an amount of washing that is a fixed proportion of the machine's nominal capacity, which is supposedly why smaller washing machines no longer exist.

(I.e. an 8 kg washing machine used at 80 % = 6,4 kg or whatever other fixed percentage is more efficient than a 5 kg machine used with 4 kg = 80 % of washing – what the test doesn't care about is that if you keep the absolute amount of washing fixed, 4 kg in an 8 kg-machine of course becomes less efficient).

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