Contemporary appliances actually do fail more often, and earlier, than their predecessors. They have added a bunch of extraneous things to what was a very simple, stalwart, design. These additions have drastically increased the complexity of their designs and created many fold more points of failure than there used to be. It isn’t so much that the manufacturing is sloppier, or that the materials aren’t as good, though in some ways that is a contributor, just not the main one.
If you by a recently manufactured fridge like the following, you will get a fridge that will last decades if you do the minimum to keep it in good condition. However if you buy one that has an in door ice machine, lcd touch screen, complex lay out that requires the basic mechanical devices, to keep the fridge cool, to have a bunch of extra tubing, wiring, connections, etc. it is much more likely to fail because of all the extra points of failure you added.
That fridge, in that color occupied a similarly wood paneled kitchen for me growing up. I got a little sweaty when I saw the picture, wondered who’s been in my old house.
A fridge is a fridge, the basic mechanical working principle of it didn’t change over the past 40 years. But people have a lot more expectations put into what a fridge should be able to do nowadays, and electronics or complex mechanism such as the ice maker is generally the first to break on a modern fridge.
The moral of the story is, don’t buy a fridge with an icemaker or have a tablet attached to it, and you should be fine.
Its not fully the fault of tech companies, yeah there is some planned obselecence. But there won’t be anymore “I will outlive you” appliances cause the more mechanical it gets the more cheaper and easier it is to repair and they also tends to have less individual components.
I don’t think any of those new smartish watches even from the best of Swizz makers could last like it did 100years ago.
I still have my $120 fridge from like 2010-2011ish back when Sears was a thing and it’s still going without any issues. Zero maintenance ever needed thus far.
No ice maker in it, and the freezer part is on top like in the pic. Apparently if the freezer is on the side instead of on top, those break down way more often.
I have a freezer on the top too. It did collect some ants for whatever reason (my house is a literal ant colony at this point) but it still works OK, just like the bottom part (where it says OK).
It’s not really a temperature sensor, it always says that regardless of how cold you set the fridge (and no, absolute zero is not possible, sorry for ruining the fun).
But, depending on how cold the fridge is, it turns blue, but the bit that says OK stays white.
In 2016 my parents bought a new microwave oven and gave their old one to me. That new microwave is broken now and the one I got is still operating the same as it did in the 90s.
Remember in Australia, if you’re persistent enough, you could get this replaced under Australian Consumer Law, if something breaks in an unreasonable amount of time (outside of warranty, even). Considering fridges can easily last for 10 years, anything well within that should be fairly easy (but require many, many emails and threatening to taken them to your local small claims) to get replaced.
That is if you can do without a fridge in the meantime 😅
While consumer laws in the US generally suck, there are a few stores that have amazing return policies and go out of their way to please customers, Costco being one of them.
I know a guy who brought back his 10-year-old broken plasma flatscreen TV without a receipt. They replaced it with a new model, no questions asked.
My TV came with a five year warranty - two year manufacturer, two years Costco, and one year from my Costco credit card.
My washer and dryer got seven. Same deal, but Costco was offering an extra extended warranty plan for free.
The best part is that they design their warranties to run consecutively instead of concurrently. Unfortunately, Citi got rid of the extended warranty with the Costco credit cards about a year and a half ago.
Yeah. That’s why we can’t have nice things. The US should consider extended warranty rules similar to the EU. But that’s probably too “socialist” or whatever.
I wouldn’t say it uses an unreasonable amount of power to run. I may be wrong, but a water heater and some pumps can’t be more efficient other than insulation so it wouldn’t waste power to heat the surrounding air.
Funny coincidence, I’ve recently watched a video by TechnologyConnections on dishwashers and thought about the hot water connection thing. Here in Europe our dishwashers are usually connected to hot water, whereas the washing machine is only connected to cold… wondered about that difference, too.
That’s super interesting! I currently live in Norway, but I used to live in Lithuania, and for both countries I can say that it’s common for dishwashers and washing machines to heat their own water. It’s interesting to see how different countries have solved the “get hot water” problem for appliances.
Modern washing machines auto-balance the load, which negates the need for the massive weights you get inside older washing machines for stability. The motors in older ones also have to work harder because of this since it is trying to spin an unbalanced drum. I also assume modern ones have more efficient brushless motors etc.
The load balancing thing definitely applies to the front loading washing machines we have here, no idea about top-loading.
Ours is front loading, and I’m sometimes scared to take a dump in the same room when the thing is spinning full speed, as the dryer on top of it bounces and shakes aggressively, most likely due to the lack of auto balancing. I guess I didn’t think of the inefficiencies there
not energy, but def water. modern wash machines are extremely water efficient. That may result in energy savings if you’re using hot water. Modern detergent doesn’t really need hot water though.
I had one that lasted 15 years. In that time it had to be repaired twice, and the rail for the drawers broke out so I had no crispers. It was remarkably expensive.
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