Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

My 2000-era Bosch washing machine failed. I opened it up and it had a huge circuit board which was pretty easy to figure out and repair. I imagine these days it would just have a few power transistors and an inscrutable ASIC. Sigh.

BTW all my appliances from 20 years ago (washer, dryer, dishwasher, pool heater, fridge, oven, stove..) are still going strong. I've only had to fix the washer and microwave.

View on HN

I've kept alive my Fisher & Paykel dish drawers and double oven from 2004. I've even retrofitted improvements they made to the models during their production run when a part has failed and they've sold me the improved part. The oven was fun. I had to build an exact-height dolly to remove it from my cabinet to work on it:

https://ibb.co/yP05P1j

https://ibb.co/5Lxqc3N

But after that it was easy to swap parts. These aren't exactly high tech appliances. :-)

None of my other 2004 appliances have survived. The Trio fridge failed at 16 years and it was in the closed system, so not worth paying someone to fix and I don't have the necessarily refrigeration system skillset. A top-load Maytag washing machine also failed at about 16 years. The bottom seal gave up the ghost. I probably could've fixed that but I really wanted to redo my entire laundry room anyway so upgraded to a new HE model and matching electric dryer (previous dryer was gas). Those are now 4 years old and have so far been trouble free.

I'm genuinely curious: Have you compared their efficiency levels with newer appliances?

I have not. I suspect the fridge would be a good upgrade, but probably not the others.

Even if efficiency had improved, the cap ex of replacing it would probably take a long time to pay off.

I was at a mini-lecture about how to save energy in small houses, and the lecturer stated that a 10 year old fridge uses 2X the power of a modern one. For a 15-year old fridge that goes up to 3X.

I have not researched this to verify but have no reason to doubt it.

I've monitored the electricity usage of the original 30yr old fridge my house has. It uses about 980kwh a year with today's energy prices costing about $400. If I got a new generic fridge ($630) with the energy star rating of 332kwh a year, that would save a whopping $265 a year. That's a 2.5yr break even. If you get a fancy fridge costing double the price and using double the energy it doesn't make as much sense

And that's not even considering the cost of being less repairable.

2.5year break even seems pretty fantastic actually. I did the math on replacing my boiler and it was something like between 12-15 years to pay back.

>I imagine these days it would just have a few power transistors and an inscrutable ASIC

That just make an it easier to replace with an ESP32 and flashing OpenWashingMachine

git hub actually has some washing machine repos.

Man I love open source

curious if these are mostly circuit diagrams or also contain dimensioned engineering drawings for components/pieces?

Does openwashingmachine really exist?

EDIT: found https://github.com/topics/washing-machine?l=c%2B%2B&o=asc&s=..., https://github.com/stav98/Washing-Machine, https://github.com/narenakash/IoT-and-Smart-Laundry-using-On..., https://github.com/tailsu/miele-brain

Reply on news.ycombinator.com