Why refrigerators and other kitchen appliances break so easily now
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In 2024 you can still buy a new dishwasher with a mechanical dial control that will last you forever.
The Maytag Centennial series of washers and driers sell themselves on being simple, robust designs that last forever.
Gas appliances are generally have dirt simple mechanisms - they are cheaper and last forever.
Part of the problem is that people have insane requirements they demand out of their appliances now - freezers on the bottom but ice makers up top, dishwashers with hidden control panels, washing machines that can do 16 pairs of jeans, etc.
The trick is to think like a landlord - there is still a market demand for longevity if you are willing to live with the tradeoffs.
Who wins? The appliance companies surely. The owners who appreciate the convenience of a sink built into a stove that allows them to fill a pot for pasta water with one less trip to the sink (next decades model will include a drain I am sure but we aren't there yet). And the rest of us bear the costs of real estate priced to get a profit margin on the expenses of these "upgrades" the previous owner's real estate agent prescribed for you, in addition to a diminished supply chain of regular old appliances that work fine for 40 years.
We have Maytag Centennial dryer and washing machine - they may be robust but they're quite inefficient compared to "modern" washing machines both in terms of water use and cleaning performance (our last known-unreliable LGs lasted 5yrs until we moved). Same with our old Whirlpool dishwasher that seemed to have been tuned to the olden detergents with phosphates and barely cleaned dishes, you often had to rerun some of them vs our millenium Bosch that cleans the same dishes with 1/4 the detergent.
But it's not quite as bad with appliances imo. I have had good luck getting the higher end models without _all the unnecessary bells and whistles_.
It's probably like new cars, efficiency gains come with complexity, so efficiency/reliability might be a trade-off. I, personally, can buy a used replacement board online and replace it myself after 5-10yrs but that still means someone else threw out their machine for parts.
And then on top of that, at least here in CA with $0.4/kWh, a 300kWh/y fridge costs $200/y less to run than an 800kWh/y fridge. That's $2000 over 10 years and might cover several repairs. I wouldn't generally prematurely replace a machine just for efficiency but I'm also not sure running that fridge from 1935 is really monetarily efficient, even if your newer fridge does break more often.
I'll take a little bit of inefficiency on my end as a consumer. I am the little man after all my footprint is small enough compared to what globalized industry is wreaking on the planet. I shouldn't be made to feel bad to have a washer dryer that is actually a time savings compared to a washboard and clothes line.
FWIW in CA your rate also depends on your provider. I am paying like 16 cents a kilowatt hour.
IMO dryer is for when it's impossible to dry indoors/outdoors because of cold/humidity.
wow, that is so low.
PG&E charges from 29-50+ cents per kwh and the average is 35.
> freezers on the bottom but ice makers up top, dishwashers with hidden control panels, washing machines that can do 16 pairs of jeans, etc.
The bottom end of the market for the most part doesn't look like either of these. Maybe that Maytag line is an exception.
The bottom end of the market is cheap junk made of low-quality plastic parts, with junky levers, hinges, and buttons, and questionable UX around those buttons. Dishwashers with plastic tubs that warp in the heat and dish racks where the coating wears off and they start to rust after a few years of use. Refrigerators with plastic trim that cracks and isn't replaceable except without ordering a $50 all-in-one shelf unit. Etc.
And there is no middle tier of anything anymore: it's all bifurcated into "cheap junk" and "luxury".
If you go look at the lowest price GE appliance in most categories it's almost certainly going to outlive their high-end stuff.
Seems pretty low on the list considering the number of people I know who can't get theirs to keep water inside.
I have to load mine just right or it'll throw a ton of water on the floor. Once I figured out where stuff has to go I can make it work, but I don't feel like I should need to.
I know a guy with a pan under the door as a drip tray just in case.
This isn't wear or an old seal, they have been like this since new. They aren't fancy by any means.
If you never had another dishwasher in your life, you'd probably think it was fine, because it does wash.
But this replaced a 20 year old low end GE, that had a plastic interior that the only reason I replaced it was the tracks would no loger hold the upper rack and there was no practical way to fix that the way the wheels were attached to the inside walls. And the door latch would fail to register the door as closed and stop running in the middle of a wash. It ran for so long that I had repaired the drain hose twice from simply getting hard and fragile and cracking open, 10 years ago.
It was starting to fall apart from pure age... but one problem I never had with that thing was weak ineffective washing. It washed twice as good as the new one the very day I removed it.
And I did 3 days of research trying to figure out what to get before getting it. All reviews just said it was great.
It IS quiet which I think is half the problem. They compromised washing in favor of noise and water & electricity usage.
And the reviewers are all infant 20 year olds who apparently never experienced anything else and don't realize this thing, and I guess all current machines, is good looking junk.
I think the controls on top are annoying. It's like putting the dashboard of your car under your seat.
I remember renting years ago and the ANCIENT water heater went.
The landlord replaced it with a similar model with a pilot light. He said they last longer and have fewer problems. It used gas continuously, and though the landlord got longevity, I got the gas bill. Annoying.
(I rent, and I have what seems like a pretty modern fridge. The only real innovation I can discern between it and my childhood home's 20+ year old fridge is that it beeps when it's been left open for more than a minute.)
* Better organization - pull out can drawers or exterior-facing small doors so you don't need to expose the whole contents of the fridge to warm air just to grab a can of soda or the ketchup
* Water and ice dispensers - not brand new tech but I've owned plenty of fridges without them (even bought one such fridge within the last 10 years) and much prefer to have them.
* More temperature zones
* Better internal organization
* Significantly better energy efficiency
* Reduced noise
I don't want to have to replace appliances (or cars, or most anything) every 5 years, so I'm glad there are a range of options, but there do continue to be quality of life improvements.
Couple of really nice ones - vacuum chamber for meats, humidity controlled area for vegetables.
Or just being able to put hot food without worrying it will spoil everything else (probably ok with most modern fridges tbh).
(But practically: I don't think the domestic Japanese refrigerator market is available to me, at least not without going through some very expensive and individualized import process. So maybe I'd like to buy one of these, but they're not immediately available to me on a 5 year cycle anyways :-))
It's possible the food you lose could cost a significant portion of the fridge price.
I have always wondered about that when I see the LG fridges with glass doors (knock to light up). I don't think the R value of even a great glass door can be very good.
[1]: https://appliance-standards.org/blog/how-your-refrigerator-h...
When I've found a fridge that solves the problem of keeping my food safe, and does it reasonably well (quietly, efficiently, etc), I never want to solve that problem again. I don't care about any incremental improvements whatsoever. I could die happy without ever buying another appliance of any kind.
This is true for most things that I own. My car, my phone, my computer, my TV, etc.
When it comes to hobbies, sure, I can indulge a little in the hedonic treadmill thing. For the rest of it, don't bother me.
That's not your problem until a government makes it the manufacturer's problem, and of course you're going to be against them doing that because it's an affront to free markets and will increase your costs so you can no longer get a new "disposable" fridge every five years.
Oh, well. Nothing to do, I guess.
What could go wrong?
- No carbon waste
- No hassle/time waste to install new one
- Good tech that I truly want in a fridge comes around every 20 years, not 5.
- Fridge seems to be getting bigger and bigger. No decision fatigue in having to choose a decreasing number and best of limited options every 5 years.
'Stuck' with something good and reliable is good thing for god's sake!! Where the minds got distorted into this get a lot new things fast, just because it is Brand New kind of nonsense?....
There's no reason to expect refrigerators of constant quality to get more expensive in real terms, and NPV calculations traditionally assume a reasonable (and positive) cost of capital, likely exceeding the rate of inflation.
So I would've said 1000 + 920 + 850 + 780, or something like that.
You mean no such reason that you want to find. Same extremely lowered (shit) quality things cost same present value, so increased through time with inflation, items made more complex as this is the case with fridges involving unnecessary 'engineering' and 'development', adding additional costs, old inventions hit wall for improvements after a while, probably we could find some more reasons if we analyse how prices increase for the same kind of product in time, which is the norm for things exist for multiple decades. (you may think about months or few years timespan here of new inventions/developments with maturing manufacturing and the pay off of investments of develping something new, but it is so very far from the situation here).
I also wonder how many people had fridges in 1935 vs now. I don't think it's some cynical plot to make things worse over time but a result of competition. It's similar with flying and how miserable it is. People fly a lot more these days because competition has driven cost down and make it more accessible but quality had to be sacrificed. If you can afford it, business or first class flying is still pretty nice.
Some plastics last forever, others don’t. There’s no way to tell without buying one and seeing if the parts self destruct or not.
With metal it’s simpler, it just lasts.
When I recently went through this for a new oven I found the high end ovens were all gas tops (I was set on switching to Induction - and boy am I thrilled to have made that decision!) and on the metrics they were smaller ovens, had fewer bells and whistles, but had a big brand on the front for impressing guests.
There is a business opportunity here, like Framework (with open specs), but for Induction cooktops, refrigerators, dishwashers, etc.
My GE Electric Oven was installed when my house was built in 1967, which makes it 57 years old. It still works perfectly, calibration spot-on. Full disclosure: one of the four burners is inoperative. I can live with that forever.
New Whirlpool fridge is bigger, nicer, and much, much more efficient to the point where it made more financial sense to replace the old working one.
>And even if you want to repair rather than replace, you might not be able to do so easily. When it comes to electronic components, “the pace of change is so fast that a company will make something one year, and in two years down the line, they don’t make that component,” says Michael Pecht, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. “They’re making the next generation and that new component may not fit the old one.”
Let’s just say, this is a very complex problem and people are aware of it. But it’s not easy to solve. Technological progress, customer psychology, geopolitical questions, market positioning and branding are things you need to consider.
It takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely stand.
A second of life beyond the warranty period is profit that the manufacturer can hold on to rather than give to the consumer. With microprocessors and new materials you can cut the edge closer and closer. Who cares if you destroy the brand's reputation, the executives and PE will be gone before that matters.
I don't plan to buy any new refrigerator until it has full AI capabilities to generate recipes (including visuals) and guidance based on an inspection of the ingredients it contains.
Anybody can shove inventory management and a knapsack solver into a Raspberry Pi, I want real AI and robotics.
Completely different example I encountered recently. A bike tech told me the highest end components need constant adjustment and maintenance since tey are made of such lightweight materials. Totally fine if you've got a dedicated maintenance tech on your racing team. Pain in the ass if you're a weekend warrior.
There are many ways in which a robust, reliable, or strong thing is less efficient.
It's a basic fundamental trade-off in everything everywhere, like security vs convenience, like form vs function.
A reliable motor that will run forever has big solid castings, big heavy windings (meaning fewer turns in the same volume), and no electronics at all, nor brushes. That means a shaded pole synchronous motor.
An efficient motor has thin windings with a lot more turns in the same volume, and light weight rotor construction that can start/stop with less inertia, ,driven by dc power and pwm electronics.
The electronic motor is a lot more efficient but has 100x more parts, dies from some part failure 100x more frequently and lasts a fraction as long.
A reliable boiler is made out of a thick mass of cast iron with thick walls and not much surface area, and so is an inefficient heat exchanger. An efficient heat exchanger is paper thin sheets of stainless steel and lots of closely packed fins or folds or tubes for more surface area, which burns through or corrodes through or clogs up in a couple years, and cost a lot more to make.
An efficient ice engine has a turbo, a reliable engine does not.
The very definition of the word efficient usually means less overhead in some form in most contexts, which means running closer to the failure point, which means failing sooner. It's a kind of truism in that sense where the very meaning of the word efficient can be reworded to literally mean less reliable, not because that just happens to be an associated consequence, but because it literally means less overhead, less excess capacity, less redundancy, etc.