Comment by dublin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dublin | Hacker News Reader

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ALL older appliances were way more reliable than any you can buy today. I'm just old enough that all our appliances are from the 1980s, plus a huge chest freezer from the 60s or 70s bought secondhand on Craigslist for $45. They are simple, reliable, faster, and work better than their modern counterparts. Our refrigerator, bought in 1989, has never had any problem at all.

They can be easily fixed, and parts are still available - unlike my Mom's 5-8 year-old Samsung and LG appliances, which will have to be thrown away and replaced soon, because parts are NOT available. As for efficiency - they're not really much less efficient than new ones, especially when you figure that each of them has outlasted a half-dozen or more modern appliances.

When the washing machine tub cracked a couple of years ago, I asked the local parts shop if it was worth getting our old Kenmore(Whirlpool) machine fixed, and when he found out it was from 1987, the manager said, "Don't ever get rid of it! You can't buy anything made that well today at any price!" So I spent $80 on a new tub (plus $75 for labor, since installing it is a pain). That's one of only two major repairs it's ever needed (I swapped out the synchronous clock driven cycle controller myself 15 years ago) - it still runs just like it did when new.

It's certainly possible that all my appliances could outlive me...

I had an old chest freezer from the 80s.

You had to manually defrost it for it to keep working. Modern ones have automatic defrosters and other such features.

Yes, the old one "kept working", but at worse-and-worse reliability as the frost built up, until you manually removed everything from the freezer and ran a proper defrost cycle (aka: turn it off, wait for everything to melt, sponge out the water).

I think I'll stick with my "less reliable" heater-inside-a-freezer with an escape hole to automatically siphon + pump the water out. More moving parts means less reliability, but these features are absolutely worth the loss in reliability.

My family had a bunch of 80's appliances. They were terrible feature-wise like the washer would eat my clothes, the dryer was practically either stupid hot or practically no heat, and the fridge didn't have any defrost functionality nor water features. They broke down or were otherwise replaced in the 90s. They were replaced with units with far more features and were good until the 2020s, surviving a few moves. A few even got sold in the end as needs changed.

My current kitchen has a microwave that's from the early 2000s, it works fine and has exceptional even heating and top notch auto sensor modes. The 1980s one we had was a total hunk of junk that constantly had failures, wasn't as powerful, didn't have any sensor cooking modes, and performed very poorly at cooking evenly. The other microwave from the 90s ate fuses for breakfast and had massively unreliable sensor cooking modes.

So for me, practically all my newer appliances are way better than the old ones and have still often lasted >10yrs. Anecdotes are anecdotes.

> ALL older appliances were way more reliable than any you can buy today.

Sure, if you only consider all the older appliances that have survived this long.

While old appliances have good features, LG and Samsung have earned a reputation of being bad. Whirlpool and GE still make some good stuff and they still sell parts. The reason you keep the old washer is the new versions legally cannot use as much water, and so they don't clean as well.

Oh you can buy the old wasteful washers if you still want them. They just don't got any EnergyStar ratings (in fact, people have been shopping around for "lack of EnergyStar" to find those old wasteful washers).

But "they don't clean as well" is a bit of a myth. More water requires more soap, and as it turns out, shuffling clothes around with *proportionally more soap* and *less water* leads to better cleanliness for the vast majority of stains.

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Think about it: if my washer only uses 1 gallon of water, but yours uses 5 gallons of water, your soap is 5x less effective than my same soap.

Its not the "water" that cleans, its the soap after all. With one exception: caked on mud prefers water over all other solvents.

But with regards to blood, sweat, grapes, tomatoes, and "typical" stains, its not the "water" that does anything. Its the soap. See ConsumerReports.org testing (ketchup tests and whatnot), as well as efficiency numbers that they've tested.

its the mix of water and soap. There is a fix amount of soap per liter water and kg of clothes. so its both

Water is called the "universal solvent" for a reason. We use soap for the exceptions, but water still does the bulk of the removal of things you don't want (dirt, salt), while soap handles the rest (generally oil based stains)

Except the #1 thing you are washing off is the natural oils from human skin and sweat.

And #2 and #3 are the oils in food (chocolate, grease, wine, and other food products) and then the oils from grass / outdoors.

Literally the only thing that water helps with is soil / dirt. Outside of that, the washing machine should be designed to use the minimum amount of water needed to activate the soap, the actual cleaner.

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