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Survivorship bias
Sure it will work forever, but it also never really worked right in the first place. Those are definitely the fridges where one section freezes and other areas are almost room temp
People also have survivorship bias with these things. Sure your refrigerator might have lasted forever but quite a few others did not. There is a reason why appliance repair places existed and were much more common than today.
While that is true, items are purposely made unrepairable now. You don’t have right to repair movements because John Deere and Apple devices are so much more complex to repair for common failure points. You have those movements emerging because companies make it extremely difficult in the name of profit or style. With equally skilled (and due to the internet more informed) and capable repair personnel not being able to even partake in the process.
And it will use as much energy as everything else in the house combined.
I wonder how true that is. Does it come down to effective insulation? I also thought the old refrigerants were more efficient but really bad for the environment. The only other factor is motor/pump.
Compressors are variable and much more efficient. More efficient and variable speed fan motors along with more efficient blade design. Insulation now is drastically better than glass wool of the past. Electronics are able to be integrated in order to provide more fine grain control and overall design has been improved just due to efficiency standards being placed on a bright yellow sticker. In the past design and component choices never really considered efficiency, while efficiency doesn’t always win out it’s a weighted factor and influences the overall engineering and design in ways that just didn’t happen before efficiency regulations came about.
Insulation tech is better, yes, but also the insulation of a 40 year old fridge is by now totally fucked.
Yeah, but can you survive a hydrogen bomb blast in a 1980s fridge? No, you need a 1950s fridge for that.
Shout out to our 30 year old Miele washing machine
That will cost you a shit load of energy does it?
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.
Your washing machine is heating the water? It’s not hooked up to the hot water supply? Maybe that’s a Europe thing or something
I’m pretty sure it’s a Europe thing too, as the washing machine and dishwasher heat their own water. Didn’t know the US did it differently
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.
Remember, friends don’t let friends buy Samsung or LG appliances!
(Also, long lasting appliances still exist, you just have to be ready to pay the price, otherwise get something from the Maytag family)
citing Rossmann?
There’s some appliance breakdown vids (idk if Rossman is one of them) but the gist is Samsung and LG like to put cheap plastic parts in high wear locations which inevitably fail.
Fridges are dead simple appliances. A compressor and evaporator coils with a temperature sensor. There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t outlast you and everyone you love.
It’s insane these “premium” brands are built to fall like they do.
Real premium brands do last, but not everyone wants to pay 10k for a fridge
Checking what a fridge cost you in 1980 in an old Sears catalog, you’d be paying $4000 today accounting for inflation.
But people compare their reliability to 1000$ fridges today
Anything from BSH group is good from what I’ve heard online from other netisens
Which is
- Bosch
- Siemens
- Neff
- Gaggernau
Miel are also good especially for vacuum cleaners
All of this information I remember from reddits buy it for life subreddit which really should have a lemmy version
Buy it for life is on lemmy! Idk how to link it, but search for it and it should pop up
@[email protected] @[email protected] @@[email protected]
The Community on slrpnk.net seems to be the biggest and most active, the second biggest is on sh.itjust.works.
and for linking you can do
\[Name of the link](https://nameoftheinstance.net/c/nameofthecommunity)or you can just do [email protected] so you can visit using you own home instancehave a nice day! :-)
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 😅
This is not legal advice.
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.
Real answer is planned obsolescence.
All of those systems can be maintained and serve for long. Electronics is not the culprit - it can serve for decades easily. Also, most people don’t need their fridge or whatever to be extra fancy.
But the producer really wants for their product to die - this forces you to buy another unit, which increases their revenue.
This is only partially true. Yes we do engineer things to fail at a certain point, but that’s only because back in the day we naively assumed that we could engineer things not to fail at all.
Yes a stator of an electric engine will probably not fail for 100 years, but the seals will - yes the statically stressed metal part will hold until it crumbles to rust, but the dynamically stressed plastic part won’t - yes the silicon in an IC-Chip is protected from corrosion, but the connector pins aren’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s always a part that will fail before another, there’s no way to economicaly engineer around that, today we simply have the data to statistically define a failure point.
A fridge usually has a 10 year warranty. This isn’t even the end of life point. After 10 years it’s most likely that 80-90% of devices will still work. This means that if your device survived 10 years it will most likely work for another 5-10 years.And then 10 years in you should be able to change the part that’s broken and keep the fridge operational.
People say that like the replacement parts are just a mystical thing that spawns out of thin air once they need them.
Most parts that break are injection molded plastic. Injection molding is what differentiates manufacturing and home made garbage. Something home made will never look and function as good as something injection molded by a manufacturer. And the reason for that is cost. To say injection molding is expensive is an understatement. The machines, the tools, the expertise and the material is something that a private individual could never afford and has barely any profit margin for manufacturers. On top of that there’s storage and distribution.
So if a manufacturer has to produce extra pieces of each part that might break, store and keep track of them for 10+ years for models that are no longer produced, then the customer better be ready to cover those costs with their initial purchase or have the replacement part be ridiculously priced.
We accuse companies to want their cake and eat it too, but the we do the same thing. We want products to be cheap but also reliable or look good but be repairable. We can’t have all.\There are plenty of devices that are cheap AND repairable - looking at a ~15-year old Brother HL-2140 printer by my right hand that still has all key parts readily available (not that I ever needed to change anything other than drum and toner, but parts are there)
The secret to cheap repairability is actually quite simple - make a good, no-fuss model and sell it for long. This will remove the necessity to print specific parts in small batches for older models, and by the time the model actually gets retired, there’s so much spare parts you barely need to produce anything at all.
Granted, this doesn’t work that well with ever-evolving stuff like computers (although it does to a certain extent), but most other tech is just fine a decade or more in.
