Everyone wants WiFi and an App..... except anyone who actually understands IT and networking..
Why do appliances completely suck now days?
- Thread starter The Tradition
- Start date
Impossible.
The post I replied to indicated that Energy Star had made everything unreliable these days...
Plastic parts and too much unnecessary technology. After 7 straight years, 14 repairs across 2 different Samsuck fridges, I did my home work. I now have GE with an icemaker in the freezer (where it belongs) and a simple water dispenser inside the door.
Not saying I won't have issues down the road, but I most likely won't have icemaker issues again. Word of warning, stay the hell away from LG (compressor issues) and Samsuck (icemaker and temp regulation).
Marine battery. Deep cycle, so I'd assume it would "let you know" when it needs recharging before it develops sulfates and degrades.
I'd just take the thing out of the boat after every boating season and throw it on a battery tender; get a desulfator module to pulse away the buildup. Lead acid batteries can last quite a while if you take care of them.
This. I repaired our washer this past year via YouTube video. I will say though that it was not easy. New model GE front loading washer. Putting the metal spring ring that holds the door seal was difficult and required a lot of curse words. I also need to be better organized when removing parts and screws. I tend to be one who finds an extra or comes up one short when done.
Mmm…true capitalists wouldn’t want the government telling them they need to add efficiencies for saving energy and washing loads with 1/3 the water, such that it isn’t uncommon to have to wash twice or significantly reduce the load size thus creating more loads - both of which defeat the whole efficiency idea.
What really IS hilarious is men talking about how to do laundry.
Same. Actually, it was my mom's and I also fixed my washer. It was throwing a UL (unbalanced load) code. Turns out it was a lose stator bolt. Cost? a few bucks for a tube of blue loctite. The internet has a wealth of info to DIY just about anything.
I'm part of a FB group called Appliance Repair Advice.
The people that don’t understand are the ones that have internet connections to everything in there home and don’t understand why their network is so slow.
This is very true, I tell my wife I could build a house using youtube videos. I am replacing both rubber seals on our garage doors today and using youtube videos to figure it out,
I just had a lead acid last 7 years. Plugged the boat into a tender when ever the boat wasn’t in use, always topped it off twice a year with distilled water.
Lifepo has got my attention due to increased discharge rate and amount as well as reduced weight. I am well into my 60s and slinging multiple 60 lb batteries around is getting to be a bit much.
What was wrong with the front-load? Those are definitely a "step up" from basin washers or any dryer in complexity.
I just had the latch on my front-load break (again - shitty plastic piece).
only this time it was lodged inside the switch. Broke the switch/box trying to get it out. But super easy to remove the spring-ring for the seal and pop a new $20 switch in. I was prepared for that to be a major deal, but for my Electrolux model, quite easy w/ Youtube videos available. Just needed small needle-nose pliers to separate the ring and spring and it pulled right out. Switch is accessible w/o taking anything else apart.
When that door latch piece broke >5 yrs ago, I got 1 spare; ordered a few more after this one broke, and next time it breaks now I know how to pull the latch module out to shake any broken pieces out of it. First time it broke, nothing lodged in the switch, so it was removing 2 Phillips screws and a $3 part to fix it.
Most important thing when DIY'ing your repairs, is making sure you use your exact model info; you can find lots of incorrect videos out there that you might think apply to your model, but do not. And most of these mass-produced appliances are made in just a few factories and re-branded, so they share lots of common parts/designs, but you sometimes need to search around to find the info that matches your specific model.
Also, as noted above by another poster - keep your manuals, because those often have key information in them, and sometimes you can Google up a service manual for your appliance, which will have much of the info you need to repair stuff or find the right online info/videos. I get (or scan) PDFs for all my stuff, so it's always on my computer and I don't have to fish around in paper files for anything.
Generally speaking, you do not need a ton of fancy tools to DIY your own repairs on this stuff.
But you do need to be careful when disassembling and reassembling, because you can easily make things worse for yourself.
If your Grandma's stove had a computer board in it it would have failed after a few years too. Instead it had a standing pilot light and no safety shutoff if the pilot went off. People committed suicide in your grandma's stove. Not so much today.
The house we just purchased had a 6+ yo fridge, it started to leak from the in door ice machine 2 or 3 months ago. I went to a small local appliance shop and expressed I have ZERO interest in an ice box in the refrigerator section. That design (small freezer for ice inside the fridge section has failed on me twice now.
We now have a fridge that has the ice machine in the bottom freezer section and has the water dispenser inside the fridge door. Give 2 shits about the ice in the door but we do need the secondary filter for the water.
But to your first comment, exactly right. It isn't the consumers, it is the manufacturers offshoring to the cheapest manufacturer, using plastic components made by the lowest bidder and increasing the electrical aspect of a fridge vs mechanical reliability and building with limited lifespan. At this juncture, they all suck to varying degrees.
One more vote for SpeedQueen.
That's doing it right.
Most people ignore the battery, and that's why they die out so quick. Same with car batteries if your car sits a week or more at a time and you just do short trips.
Typically, those leaks for ice or water dispensers are the solenoid valves which are behind the fridge at the water intake - they do not shut all the way because they get deposits built up on them.
Super easy to replace; I replaced one of those on a washing machine 20+ years ago when I went to throw stuff in laundry and the tub was half full of water. $20 part and maybe 15 minutes to swap in.
For fridge and icemaker, it would leak/drip because after asking for water for the cubes, the solenoid valve would not close and would keep dripping out water. You barely have to take anything apart to get at them, but you do have to pull the appliance 3 ft from the wall to get to them.
The problem with car batteries and not using the vehicle enough or for long periods is the keyless entry app that is continually running. If you drive your vehicle on a regular basis the battery will be fine, if not it will run down.
When I went rving for months I use to return to dead batteries in my vehicles, now I fully charge them and disconnect the negative battery terminal when I leave. I haven’t had a problem since I started doing this.
Not this time, I took the entire ice dispenser unit apart with the expectation that it was the hard water causing calcification on the fittings. Nope. It was the freezer section had lost its seal from the fridge section and was constantly cold cycling to try and keep the temps down. Was also why the ice maker would create a large block and then not produce ice. And after 6 years all the plastic was brittle. Same failure on the last 2 door ice makers.
As I said, keeping the freeze section INSIDE a cool section is a design just waiting to fail.
Sucked a dollar bill into the drain and it got wedged. Only access to the drain was through the front, which made zero sense and increased the difficulty of the repair. I only discovered that o needed to access the front after removing the back.
Unfortunately I was unable to find a YouTube video of the exact model as it was too new. I had to improvise with an older model video. It wasn’t exact, but saved me a service call, which isn’t exactly easy to get in small town Iowa.
New washer and dryer in the past 2 years. Most expensive set I’ve ever purchased. $2k for the pair. They constantly code and now the dryer runs, but never stops running. Start it up and it reads the exact minutes left to go. Never counts down, so just continues to run. We now set our stove alarm so we don’t let a load dry for hours and hours.
Had this exact same scenario happen for us a few months ago. Repair guy came out, swapped a part in the old reliables, and said don't get new unless we have no choice. I still have a smaller fridge in the basement that my grandfather bought new in the 60s.
Three areas where we went backward and accept being treated like trash: appliances, airline travel, and removing trough urinals at stadiums.
It is exactly what you posted.
And doubled down on.
Now, you want to backtrack.
Actually no, I indicated it was a contributing reason (which it is) not the only reason. You only read and see what you want to see, you never ever see the whole story.
Why might that be, goldy? It just isn’t very complicated any more…if it ever was. I have done my share plus for 40 years…the only thing I can’t “clean” is getting the liquid chlorine outta my shorts! I have “ruined” ( my bride’s words) many a pair of shorts…I tell her I’m just expanding my pool cleaning wardrobe.
I have my own Frigidaire horror story. Was out of town for a week or so and when we got home discovered the fridge in our garage had died. The freezer stuff (which was full) was in danger of fully thawing so we had to get a fridge like that day. We went and grabbed a Frigidaire cause the price was good (first mistake). We moved the fridge in the kitchen to the garage and put the new one in the kitchen.
Long story short, we've had no less than 5 replacement icemakers and it still doesn't dispense ice like it should. Now it's starting to make a loud noise intermittently. We bought it in 2020, by the way. Now I have a repairman coming about the noise (I'm guessing the compressor) and we're going to start in about the icemaker again.
It's a piece of shit and has been from day one.
My 1950s appliances were built like tanks. Older than me but sure to outlive me. It’s laughable that so much of this great stuff was chucked in favor of gross 1970s Harvest piss and avacado puke colored crap. Mid century stuff had timeless style and lasts just as long.
Many appliance manufacturers have separate commercial-grade products that are usually built-to-last.
They are also usually more expensive.
According to this site, a washing machine cost $184.95 in 1962:
www.thepeoplehistory.com
Adjusted for inflation, that's $1895.98 in 2023 dollars:
westegg.com
I wasn't around then, so I don't know how representative that price was, but the cost of that washer in 1962 was about 2.5 times what an entry-level consumer-grade washing machine costs today.
And that's not even getting into television sets, which are less expensive and more reliable today than they were in the 1960s.
They are also usually more expensive.
According to this site, a washing machine cost $184.95 in 1962:
Sixties Electrical goods and appliances in the 1960's prices examples from The People History Site
prices for electrical goods and appliances in the 1960's examples from The People History Site
Adjusted for inflation, that's $1895.98 in 2023 dollars:
The Inflation Calculator
The following form adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, from 1800 to 2022. Enjoy!
westegg.com
I wasn't around then, so I don't know how representative that price was, but the cost of that washer in 1962 was about 2.5 times what an entry-level consumer-grade washing machine costs today.
And that's not even getting into television sets, which are less expensive and more reliable today than they were in the 1960s.
Next time use a credit card that doubles the warranty. Or buy the extended warranty. You have to now a days
It's not 1955. I've done the laundry in my household for decades.
For the record, I buy pretty cheap appliances because I honestly don't care about them. But to me there are several reasons for this:
1. Most people actually can't repair appliances themselves, no matter how easy people say it is. I spent like a day and a half trying to fix a dryer once and I couldn't do it. I've worked several different types of construction jobs, so I'm not a total idiot.
2. If you can't fix things, and you need to hire somebody to repair it, get ready to spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of money for a fix. Why in the world would I spend 300.00 dollars to pay somebody to repair a 500.00 dryer when I can just buy a new one?
3. I think a lot of people just don't have these issues. My wife and I bought our first house in 2005. That had all the appliances in it, and we never needed to replace/repair any of them. We moved into our current house in 2012, got all new appliances, and I've only had to replace the washer/dryer. But we do probably 2-3 loads of laundry per day and those machines are basically constantly running so I don't expect a huge lifespan out of them.
1. Most people actually can't repair appliances themselves, no matter how easy people say it is. I spent like a day and a half trying to fix a dryer once and I couldn't do it. I've worked several different types of construction jobs, so I'm not a total idiot.
2. If you can't fix things, and you need to hire somebody to repair it, get ready to spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of money for a fix. Why in the world would I spend 300.00 dollars to pay somebody to repair a 500.00 dryer when I can just buy a new one?
3. I think a lot of people just don't have these issues. My wife and I bought our first house in 2005. That had all the appliances in it, and we never needed to replace/repair any of them. We moved into our current house in 2012, got all new appliances, and I've only had to replace the washer/dryer. But we do probably 2-3 loads of laundry per day and those machines are basically constantly running so I don't expect a huge lifespan out of them.
Throwing away a TV (even a big one) is easier than throwing away a range.
