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.
Give me Bosch, Speedqueen, etc appliance quality with right to repair and I will pay. I want dumb yet sturdy equipment that will last.
You have a lot more faith in YC than I do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 was along term user (30 years) but my latest purchase was disappointing.
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.