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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

1. There is too much "Create an account" and "Give us your info" and "agree to these 300 pages of TOS"

2. We want our appliances to work for us rather than for data brokers

Now if my washing machine had a web server built in and I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that. In fact, if the smarts on the washing machine didn't phone home without asking me first I might even join it to my home network. But as long as the terms are that I must accept an electronic leash up my ass from the manufacturer with little say in what info they collect or to whom they give it if I want to see the status of my machine remotely then they can get stuffed.

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3. We want our appliances to work until they break down - not until the company updates the software so they break down faster (or instantly [for our safety of course]) so we need to buy a new appliance.

4. We want schematics, details, and parts availability to fix things ourselves (or for our local independent repair person to do it) rather than grovel for a tech who paid the manufacturer for the label of "brand certified" to come overcharge me for a fix that won't really fix the issue completely.

Surprised this isn’t a YC startup to be honest, what with all the open source companies in recent batches.

Give me Bosch, Speedqueen, etc appliance quality with right to repair and I will pay. I want dumb yet sturdy equipment that will last.

This hypothetical product is not going to come from a YC startup...

Agreed!

> Surprised this isn’t a YC startup to be honest

You have a lot more faith in YC than I do.

Need more than that to disrupt a 100 year old home appliance industry.

That's not VC. That's just a regular business. Please start it.

There's an entire line of Whirlpool/Amana/Roper washers that all have 5-7 LED lights under the cycle selector knob and are top-loader washers. If you push the drum of these washers toward the cycle selector panel you can reach down on the left side and pull a service manual out that gives you instructions on how to access a troubleshooting menu in the control board, plus electronics schematics and strip circuits to simplify troubleshooting when parts go out. They're very simple and all use some combination of a main motor to agitate and spin, a drain motor, a "run capacitor" to smooth out power, and a shifter to change from agitate to spin, and a pressure transducer either in the water level selector or built in to the main PCB depending on whether it has auto-sense.

They're ridiculously easy to work on and you can buy parts for them off PartSelect.com. The most common issues are that a relay on the control board goes out or the suspension wears out. Both are easy to diagnose.

Thank you!

I noticed when I was delivering and installing appliances that many have a service manual tucked away somewhere with similar information. Ranges were typically taped on the back somewhere, I can't remember where the other appliances stashed them.

The delivery people or service techs from the appliance store sometimes steal these documents. Probably to make sure the owner has to call the store for service. When I opened my wife's washing machine to repair it the manual was missing and I had to find it online. It was brand new so someone from the store or warehouse probably stole the document.

Far down my todo list is to rehab an old washing machine I have sitting around that was said to have a "bad control board". Rather than buying another proprietary control board that always seem to somehow go "bad", my plan is to find or create a generic control board that handles driving the hardware and runs the state machine, and talks via serial to an ESP32 for local-control MQTT integration.

I feel like retrofitting older appliances might be the way forward, whether preemptively or as part of a repair. Although I do admit there are benefits to modern brushless drives (etc), that would be hard to design a generic control board for.

Although recently having gotten a tiny bit of experience with off the shelf PLCs, going that way might be the right answer rather than reinventing the wheel.

I lost the control board on a very simple electric stove, 4 pots for the stove top, 1 control for the oven, and a display with 2-3 LEDS and a display that showed either the time or the temp.

Looked very simple. Had a relay for the oven and 2 temp sensors. One for controlling the oven, and another to shut everything down if the temp outside the oven got too hot.

I do wonder how many types of these boards would be required to fit the common appliance types.

The oldest automated appliances were just complex mechanical timers sequencing various things on and off, and appliances haven't advanced that much. On/off motors, solenoids, sensors, and some series limit switches.

Probably the biggest new difference I've seen is brushless motors with variable frequency drives, which requires its own power control electronics and probably some calibrations.

So in my estimation not very many. Packaging it all up in a way that an appliance tech could be comfortable installing would be the hard part.

Is this something we engineers could create an online space for - eg 'repairWiki' - where we jailbreak appliance controls in an open-source kinda way? Would this run afoul of the law, or just Big Appliance?

Well, I'm not talking about "jailbreaking" (loading one's own software that perhaps may involve defeating treacherous computing measures), but rather wholesale replacement of the control board with a generic open one. That you're wondering if this might be illegal shows just how far manufacturers have succeeded in separating us from the idea of modifying things we own.

Documentation would be fantastic, but it feels like a curation/discovery problem. After a bunch of deep searching, you can usually find a forum where people are discussing various lines of machines at a higher level, what features they have, repairability, etc. Parts websites generally have diagrams and whatnot (no idea where these come from or what it takes to get access to it wholesale). You can usually figure out cross reference part numbers from pouring through eBay/Amazon listings. And sometimes you even stumble onto a wiki or something where someone has documented a specific machine tangential to another project (eg Home Assistant).

Gathering it all up in one place to be useful, especially in a way so people will contribute their findings back so it can be self-sustaining, seems like the hard problem to me.

I have Bosch and Siemens appliances and they are quite repairable? I fix some of the things myself and for some others I call a technician, and usually the fix is simple and involves replacing a moderate number of parts.

I do about an appliance repair a year across my house and both of our parents' houses. I've literally never found parts or information availability to be a barrier to doing these repairs.

HN was complaining about appliances a couple weeks ago, I think it started about TVs, and somebody confidently posted a link to Miele's washer/dryers-that they would last 25years no problem, and I clicked through... it was all touch screens and mielehome their smart platform. Like, maybe their motors will out last me but I do not trust any web service to last the end of a given calendar year.

Miele isn't longer what it used to be.

I was along term user (30 years) but my latest purchase was disappointing.

I’m not a fan of the new UI and features, but Miele still makes an amazing washer and dryer.

Forgive me, I need a rant. My fury with Miele knows no bounds, and has consumed (parts of) the past two years of my life. We went all-in with Miele because of their marketing around long-lasting products, purchasing a dishwasher and a (hella expensive) multi-fuel (gas/electric) range and oven. The dishwasher is a generally solid product, however, after a few years of heavy use — we work from home and cook a ton — it's making gradually-loudening grinding noises. The range has been a garbage fire since day one, with a cascade of problems.

I'm sitting on $8k worth of rather new appliances that I am unable to repair in any fashion. When we bought them from a local appliance store — we live in a rural New England state — they were Miele-certified. Then they outsourced that certification to a local appliance-repair technician. Then Miele revoked the certification, or otherwise is no longer providing it, to that appliance-repair technician.

My appliances are broken. I call the place I bought it: they punt me to their repair technician. That repair technician is outright hostile and hates Miele and says they never call him back and he's not certified anymore. I call Miele. They punt me to "regional dispatch," which then ends up punting me behind the scenes back to the place I bought the appliances from, which doesn't ever call me back. I keep trying to push further, but all I get from Miele is that there are no certified technicians within X miles of me. This cycle has repeated 8 or 10 times.

The part I believe we need to fix the dishwasher is >$500 non-wholesale, so that is too expensive of a risk to take if it's not what will fix it. No non-certified appliance repair techs in the area (thin on the ground in general) will touch Miele products.

So I am literally waiting for them to stop working and then I guess I'll throw them away?

One of these days I'll generate the gumption to, I dunno, send a letter to Miele HQ or something?

So desperately screwed as a consumer here.

I use a zigbee smart outlet to monitor the power usage (I have a gas dryer so easier to do than something on 220) and use that to notify when the washer/dryer are done.

I do something like if power usage goes above x, then wait till it goes below that for at least 3 minutes and notify me then (exact timing may depend on the washer/dryer)

Great idea, thanks for the tip.

I do the same with my washer. 100W threshold to know it's running and then has to be below 5W for 3 minutes to be done. ntfy.sh alert is then sent to whoever is home (or just me if nobody is home).

> I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that

As long as this monitoring system can completely fail, and the machine still works, I'm okay with it. Ultimately, the more shit like this that gets shoved into appliances, the more the cost climbs. And, If I had to guess, actual functionality (eg. washing my clothes) is the target of cost cutting measures. Which is precisely what I don't want in an appliance.

And that nice and handy remote update that either disables a bunch of stuff that you already paid for or that bricks a perfectly good piece of hardware if the company goes out of business.

https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Washers-and-Dryers/Samsu...

I think the bigger issue is that the smart features just aren’t useful

They’re all just tech demos… and often buggy ones

A valuable feature solves a problem

At first, I got excited about IOT showing up and the possibilities. I could automate everything ! Smart lights, smart TV, smart fridge, smart washing machine, smart toaster, smart coffee machine, smart switch, smart plugs, smart lock, smart speaker, smart photo frame .... I spent months, interconnected everything, it felt awesome. Till it didn't.

Few years in, I realized what a lie, a mirage it all has been! I bought them to make my life easier, it did the reverse (with some very rare exceptions). I just kept seeing weird bugs, random forced updates, missed schedules, firmware issues, interoperability issues.

Then, I started seeing ads in physical mail, emails, even phone calls for new or renewing subscriptions. Real creepy stuff. All this to monitor usage and sell me more stuff ! I pulled the plug, dialed back on everything smart. I then realized I had a hard time getting my hands on products that get the job done and don't force me to connect it to the internet.

I'm now monitoring my router logs for weird activity, locking products down and actively figuring out ways to firewall them.

Such a waste!

Appliance makers can't seem to resist trying to push you into an "ecosystem" that they own rather than allow you to use open standards, and its super frustrating. I suspect a lot of their internal dev teams think they're adding value and delivering customer-centric features, but they're actually pretty customer-hostile by trying to trap us.

Note to makers of "smart" appliances: if you want my business then support standard Zigbee or ZWave hubs.

Most of these devices support Google Home, which isn't ideal, but it does allow cross manufacturer compatibility. There's probably just not much demand for open standards because Home is good enough, up until they take the cloud server down.

Matter might improve things a bit.

> suspect a lot of their internal dev teams think they're adding value

They know they're not. Developers aren't stupid.

Hopefully, more appliances are Matter based in the future and this won't be necessary.

I was going to ask about the same; Matter or HomeKit would/should solve the problem of Privacy, right?

I seriously doubt that Google would have signed on to Matter if it didn't provide an abundance of ways to gossip about you.

Google supporting the standard is irrelevant so long as Home Assistant does. More devices in the eco system at the beginning is a plus for the health of the standard, just don't buy one of their listening devices

Google might be pretty much okay only capturing the 99.99% of people who don't think about privacy much, and want the convenience of Google Home and centralized data. Giving a slight nod to the 0.01% might even lead to a decrease in bad PR.

A robot vacuum requiring Wifi connection to work with dual HD camera on it and making accurate map of my entire home and proud of having internet access will not only keep me away connecting it to my home Wifi - with devices having sensitive data on - but from buying such device. It happened. I did not find acceptable offline one so I keep vacuuming manually.

Well you're not alone with this view. This is were Valetudo and dustbuilder should be mentioned.

With these projects, you can replace the nasty privacy-invasive bits in the vendor's SW stack.

There's a buying guide to find a matching rootable robot for your needs: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/buying-supported-robots...

I got a pair of Dreame W10s in the last Black Friday deals and they're a great help.

I wish my money wouldn't go towards the vendor crapware that takes extra efforts to get rid of. But i couldn't be happier with the result, having automated the vacuuming and mopping.

Also bought a W10 last BF, worka great without setting up wifi/valetudo.

> Now if my washing machine had a web server built in and I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that.

How big is your house? And why do you need to know when the cycle is finished?

I absolutely do not want a so-called "smart" appliance and will go out of my way not to buy one. I want something with as few buttons as possible, that promises to last a long time.

Not the original poster... but wanted to answer anyway.

I have ADHD, my washer sending a push notification to my iOS devices (I have LG ThinQ enabled washer/dryer) means I have an alert in a place where I am already looking for alerts that my washing machine is done and I should go move the clothes into the dryer.

Before I enabled push notifications for this, my laundry could sometimes sit in the washer for days, getting all nasty and moldy and needing another cycle to be run just to get them clean before throwing them into the dryer.

That is why I need to know that the cycle is finished.

Exactly, I have a LG washer that has a smart feature. But it works by the machine connecting to an LG server, and then their smartphone app connecting to the LG server, and matching up. Needless to say I have never connected it.

Why can't they just run a local webserver or API? I'd use that. Even more if it was a documented API and I could write my own automation for it.

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